Crusader Kings 2: House of Zee Mau Part 3

Here's the latest and final update after the interlude:







Altogether there were 16 rulers: 13 male and 3 female, a product of Agnatic-Cognatic Promegeniture rule.

The ruler with the highest score was King Mernix V the Great with a score of 15,264 and ruled for 35 years. The ruler with the lowest score was Queen Scathach with a score of 72 and ruled for only 2 months. She was sickly lady, if I recall correctly.

The last ruler, Emperor Pal the Bold, was my one and only emperor. I'm quite proud at being able to create the Hispania Empire, although I didn't get to enjoy much of it. Still, to start of playing a count and ended up as an emperor is pretty good, eh? :)

With a score of 124,683, it exceeds the best House i.e. the House of Capet by far (>100k).



The Hispania Empire is the land coloured in dark yellow (there are a few light-yellow coloured land belonging to the Kingdom of Galicia) . It spans the land in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, modern-day Spain, Normandy, Bavaria, Hungary, France, HRE, Italy and Sweden.

Besides being the emperor of Hispania, my last ruler was also the king of the following kingdoms:

• Andalusia
• Ireland
• Wales
• Portugal
• Bavaria
• Hungary
• Leon
• Castille

Only Galicia and Navarra kingdoms were missing from the list of dejure part of Hispania Empire. Navarra, however, was no longer considered part of the dejure list in my game, presumably because it had been held by the Kingdom of Aquitaine for at least 100 years.

Since my last ruler's wife was the ruling monarch of Aragon, his heir would inherit the Kingdom of Aragon upon her death. Then, upon my last ruler's death, his heir would have almost the entire Hispania dejure land saved for that single Galicia county (as mentioned earlier, Navarra was already out).

Some interesting observation:

• France was gradually broken up by Aquitaine and being pushed out of the Frankish land. The rulers of France had been ruling over land in modern-day Russia for centuries since then.
• Scotland was replaced by Alba
• For quite sometime already, my ruler ruled over the largest Catholic land. In fact, I believed that Byzantine Empire (orthodox Christian) is the only one that is larger.
• At one point, the eastern part of my land bordered HRE, Byzantine Empire and the Golden Horde. Scary. Fortunately, the latter two had never attacked me. HRE attacked me at every opportunity. Sheesh.

From Part 2, Queen Sisuile the Just got back the Kingdom of Jerusalem after some vassals there revolted against the then current Jerusalem ruler and installed Sisuile as the ruler. However, it was only later I realised that somehow the succession rule was changed to Gravelkind during my absence. To change that back Promegeniture, I needed to have High Crown Authority and that was 2 steps higher than the Low Crown Authority prevailing at the time. In short, no time to prevent the kingdom from going to my second son upon Sisuile's death.

So unfortunately, I had to lose Kingdom of Jerusalem once again. In future, I would join the crusade (once? twice? can't remember) to help the Pope to regain the kingdom but for the existing claimant. By then (decades later), my ruler had lost claim over the kingdom, unfortunately, but it was still good to join because

• Severe penalties for other Catholic rulers to declare war on me during the crusade
• My rulers got bucketload of prestige and piety for contributing the most to the reclamation

These were the same reasons I decided to join the crusade for the Kingdom of Hungary.

Hungary, however, didn't have an existing Catholic ruler claimant and so I was awarded that kingdom after contributing the most to the successful crusade.

So, as a result of the Jerusalem debacle, I was more careful at usurping the titles of King of Ireland and King of Leon. It turned out that they were both on Gravelkind succession law. I usurped once Ireland was on Medium Crown Authority (then promptly change to High Crown Authority and Promegeniture succession law) and Leon was on Promegeniture succession law.

Thank goodness for saved games because I couldn't find out the succession law and crown authority of the kingdoms before usurping.

(Update: searched online and there is one neat way: check the highest ranking vassal's opinion of the liege of the kingdom of interest)

This screenshot shows the various Houses. Zee Mau was definitely a great House :)



This shows the various culture. My rulers changed from Irish to Norwegian due to a particular incident: my last Irish ruler outlived his son, who was married to a Norwegian foreign female ruler. So the next heir was his grandson, being brought up overseas by his mother's chosen guardian (presumably a Norwegian) and he then became Norwegian.

This caused much trouble because most of my vassals then were Irish and Andalusian and thus had like -15 approval of my Norwegian ruler. Later, I made the effort to appoint Norwegian as ruler of newly conquered land and prioritising the marriage of Norwegian males to propagate the Norwegian culture.

I managed to convert every county to Catholic except for one county that largely Christian heretic in the last few years before the end of the game.