Montferrat: Part 08: 1524-1530: Aragonese War of Independence

The hardest wars are ones where AI is the warleader. The fight was against Castile, Mamluks, Mantua, and Florence.

Mantua, Florence, and Castilian holdings in Italy were easy pickings. Unfortunately Mamluks and Castile were both much stronger than me on the seas, so I couldn't do much about Mamluk attacks on Anatolia and Sicily. I tried to do some naval warfare, but I ended up losing almost all of my war fleet. No big deal, as I was about to unlock next tier of ships anyway, so they'd be all useless. I only had 1 Barque and 5 Galleys left after the war, which I all sold to Aragon, and built new navy from scratch.

During the war I got just over 1000dev and made myself emperor. I also finished convincing Candar to become my vassals while the war was going on, but really they just offered more free warscore for the Mamluks, so maybe it was a bad timing.

Aragon was dragging it on for far longer than they should - and in the peace deal they have me 2 provinces which were Naples cores I didn't want (as they would have no AE discount as wrong CB was used), as well as Gibraltar. I asked for all of Grenada territory as I wanted Alhambra as soon as possible, and Gibraltar was 4dev there, so I guess they didn't completely ignore me. Oh well.

While the war was going on, I took expansion ideas, and sneaked a single ship into the Atlantic to help with map stealing. I've been stealing maps like crazy from England, France, Castile, and Portugal. It's nice to have so many diplomats. I have 7 - 2 base, 1 from government rank, 2 from diplomatic ideas, 1 from policy, 1 from curia controller. After the war ended I took expansion (without exploration) ideas, and started colonizing basing it all on stolen maps, starting with the Caribbean.

Council of Trent triggered while I was curia controller, so I ignored all the cardinals voting, and took all the harsh positions:

• +2% missionary strength vs heretics
• +30% institution spread in true faith provinces
• +10% manpower in true faith provinces
• -10% warscore cost vs other religions
• at cost of -40 total opinion from Protestants and Reformed

Which is somewhat embarrassing as my ally Switzerland went Reformed, but they'll get over it.

I'm not sure why there's even any voting, conciliatory positions are all terrible.

After the war ended I managed to stack my diplomatic bonuses so high I diplovassalized 71dev Florence.

Apparently it's now also possible to trade favors for return core, so I just politely asked Aragon to return a province to Naples, and they did it. The cost is really steep, but it's free clay.

Portugal managed to be Great Power as its the first to embrace Colonialism. Nobody has a single colonial nation yet, so I didn't join too late.

Breaking the Castile/Aragon PU is a huge change in European affairs, even if the maps look just like they did before. I'd like to expand into Mamluk lands, but without vanilla's magic bridges that really needs a serious navy and they're allied to Castile, so I'd be fighting two very strong navies. So maybe just beat up France or Aztec natives instead?