In addition to this, an on_startup event absorbs the de jure Kingdom of Jerusalem into the de jure Kingdom of Syria at the start of the campaign.
- A crusade for Andalusia can (and, with some regularity, does) conquer as many as 11 duchies' worth of land. That's almost three times as many duchies as a crusade for Jerusalem (4 duchies) can conquer.
- The Kingdom of Jerusalem shouldn't be on the de jure map before at least 1100 (and possibly shouldn't be on the de jure map at all!). Wikipedia seems to indicate that (1) Godfrey of Bouillon was merely the Duke of Jerusalem before his successor Baldwin created a custom kingdom for himself, and (2) the area was considered part of a "Kingdom of Syria"-type entity under both the ERE and the Caliphate. However, vanilla CK2 (and many mods) can't portray this historical reality because the crusade CB works from de jure kingdoms and such a gigantic Kingdom of Syria doesn't match the land taken in the First Crusade. This leads to a further problem:
- Vanilla (and many mods) must artificially prevent the Kingdom of Jerusalem from being created by non-Christian characters (literally allow = { religion_group = christian }--ugh--in the landed_titles file) and from being assimilated out of existence by non-Christian kingdoms (assimilate = no, ibid.).
Solution: Define the crusade CB from duchies rather than from a kingdom. In this proof of concept, the crusade CB takes a target duchy and every adjacent duchy. (All holy sites of the attacker's religion must be conquered before crusades for duchies that do not contain holy sites of the attacker's religion can be declared. A targeted duchy that does not contain a holy site must be adjacent to a realm that shares the attacker's religion.)
If anybody else has done this already, I can't find that other person's implementation in a cursory search of the forum.
A mod that is compatible with vanilla 2.7.2 (not 2.8, and not with any other mod that edits common/cb_types) is attached to this post. See also the attached savefile, which should demonstrate the successful CB's effects within a year of loading. (The King of Scotland wins a crusade against the King of Egypt--not for the Kingdom of Jerusalem (which doesn't exist on the de jure map), but for the Duchy of Jerusalem. The Sunni counts of Ascalon and Beersheb, rather than losing their titles, are liberated from Shia control to become vassals of the Catholic victor. The Count of Beersheb must have his revolt against the Shia Duke of Ascalon invalidated first. Neither the Sunni Kingdom of Mesopotamia nor the Orthodox ERE loses its counties in the area.)
Some problems still remain with this approach.
- The illustrious @zijistark mentioned some months ago that using a de jure CB target that doesn't match the de facto conquest can cause problems with AI behavior.
- There remains some unevenness in the amount of land that can be conquered. A crusade for Kent or Galicia is worth at most 3 duchies, while a crusade for Cordoba or Cologne is worth at most 7 duchies. As noted above, such discrepancies could in theory be fixed, but I'm inclined to think that the benefit of increased consistency in size would be outweighed by the detriment of reduced consistency in shape (e.g., in a crusade for Cordoba that's limited to a total of four duchies (to match a crusade for Jerusalem), which three adjacent duchies out of the full complement of six will be taken?). In any event, the current implementation still seems better than the vanilla version.
- This implementation still fails to represent the non-Jerusalem conquests of the First Crusade. This discrepancy definitely could be fixed (as far as returning a swathe of Anatolia to the ERE and taking Antioch and Tripoli, at least, though this idea still leaves out Edessa): (1) trace the shortest path of counties from the attacker's capital, through realms of friendly and neutral religions, to the target duchy; (2) on that path, take land with the same rules described in the screenshot presented above to determine who gets the duchies, counties, and baronies (except Step 2h gives the titles, not to the most-participating crusader, but to a random crusader who hasn't already received any land in the crusade), on a duchy-by-duchy basis), but I don't at the moment want to take the time to figure out the details.
- The obvious next step is to extend similar mechanics to other kingdom-based CBs (Mongol conquest, Seljuk invasion, Shia caliphate, etc.). They might conquer duchies in a radius of 2 or even 3, rather than just 1.
See the screenshot presented at the top of this post for a summary of the code. Feel free to use this code and/or idea in your own mod (with credit).
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