I can expound on this, but I'll have to take a detour into how EU nations are created, first. It's like this. Each EU tag will exist if it is at all possible. This means that if a given Duke title is slated to become, say, Saxony, and you hold it, then a Count in that general area gets the chance of his life. Consider this extract from tagInfo.txt :
Code:
MEIS;SAC;Meissen
SAXO;SAC;Saxony
C254;SAC;Franken
C255;SAC;Thüringen
C311;SAC;Plauen
C312;SAC;Meissen
This is saying that if the Duchy of Meissen exists as a primary title, it becomes Saxony in EU2. If not, check for the Duchy of Saxony. If that doesn't exist either, check for county number 254, which apparently is Franken. And so on down.
Now, if Meissen does exist, what happens to Saxony? It is absorbed into the EU country of Saxony, along with those counties, if they should happen to be independent.
This simple procedure can be modified a bit by the unfortunate fact that there are only so many EU2 provinces to go around. Each EU2 province has several CK provinces; the nations that own these are considered candidates for ownership of the EU2 province. Each candidate is given a weight that's basically the sum of the wealth of the provinces they own, times some modifying factors for buildings and such. Highest weight wins - very simple. But, in order to give small nations a fighting chance to exist - because any nation that doesn't get any EU provinces gets chucked out of the conversion - I multiply the weight of a city by five if its owner has less than three CK provinces. (I also multiply by three if the owner is a duchy, and by five if it's a kingdom, since prestige is nine points of the law.)
The upshot of all this is, as you no doubt noticed, a bunch of minor nations all over the place. Some of these, of course, become your vassals. Let's look at Saxony again, and assume that the Duchy of Meissen exists. Then EU2 Saxony is your vassal if, and only if, CK Meissen was. CK Saxony is ignored for this calculation - unless Meissen doesn't exist, of course. In other words, vassalisation is determined by the status of the CK tag that actually got converted into the EU nation.
The profusion of minor nations is intentional; as I've remarked before, CK dynastic holdings are really quite different in kind from EU2's burgeoning nation-states. Take a look at the map of the Grand Campaign in 1419, especially France and Germany. Then note that those are unified nations in 1066 CK! Clearly, vassalship in CK is a much, much weaker concept than being actually annexed to the nation in EU, even though it makes the provinces appear in your colour.
Now, with all that said, I can examine your specific scenario. First, as the Duke of Apulia, you should have become the EU tag APU. Are you sure APUL was your
primary title? Did you by any chance lose it at some point, and gain it back? If not, then I think I'd like a look at the save.
Second, about the crown lands. You will observe that you basically get your demesne, plus whoever is unlucky enough to be below you in the queue for your primary title - in your case, only the duchy of Calabria, which you no doubt owned anyway. Also, you may not get all your demesne, due to the aforementioned weighting in favour of small nations - this is especially pronounced when you haven't got a king title. If you had cherry-picked the richest cities for your demesne, there's a good chance you lost quite a few EU provinces to some upstart Count with a single province, or two. You would get a wealthy city times three for being a duke, and he'd get two not-so-good ones times five for being small. But even if you won, your lands would be quite scattered. I do intend to softcode this modifier at some point, in fact I'll do it for version 0.7, and you can play around with it.
Now, some of this is intentional, but I have to say, you're straining my mental model of the game a bit by owning 200 duchies and no kingdoms! So I'm not entirely surprised you're getting weird effects : It's a situation I wasn't really thinking of while coding.
Ack! I just realised what you were saying : You didn't become the duchy of Saxony, you got saxon
culture! Well, disregard what I said about the primary title, then - you did in fact get the EU tag APU, right? That explains, then, why your capital ended up in Essex : It's the richest province of your national culture that you own. As for how you got saxon culture, well, see my reply to Sterk, above. Did you by any chance own a lot of England in your demesne? And come to think of it, perhaps your dynasty was Norman, which translates to anglosaxon in EU2.
Actually, this last is a bit of a buggerment. Norman in CK could reasonably translate to french, anglosaxon, or scandinavian; I've chosen anglosaxon to give historical results for England. But of course, that does tend to screw up those Italian places where the dynasty is Norman and the peasants are Italian - as you just discovered. I'm going to have to think about how to deal with this; I may have to bite the bullet and code some special cases for the Normans. Which is going to give weird results somewhere else, I just know it.
EDIT : Oh yes, cores. I've been meaning for some time to get something better than the temporary system in place now, which gives you what you own at EU2 start, plus a core on any province where you owned a city in CK. Suggestions are welcome.
EDIT 2 : Oops, you only get the king and duchy modifiers if you are a small nation. So kingdoms with one-province demesnes are extremely likely to win the contest for their EU province. Also, I'm softcodifying this now.
