Crusader Kings II - Paradox Entertainement (02/12)
- Thread starter Tellus
- Start date
Planet of Hats
Donor
Another one of these.
* Raimond-Berenguié I, or Raimond-Berenguié the Shrewd
King of Aquitaine (Feb. 27, 885 - Aug. 20, 902)
Patient and gentle, yet with an intense, ambitious zeal behind his dark gaze, Raimond-Berenguié - known in some histories by the epithet "Corbeau" (crow) for his dark, wild hair and beard and penetrating eyes - succeeded his father at the age of 36, arriving as the most gifted military organizer in all creation. He would end it as one of the most tragic figures in medieval history. One wonders how history would have unfolded had he lived longer.
* Raimond-Berenguié I, or Raimond-Berenguié the Shrewd
King of Aquitaine (Feb. 27, 885 - Aug. 20, 902)
Patient and gentle, yet with an intense, ambitious zeal behind his dark gaze, Raimond-Berenguié - known in some histories by the epithet "Corbeau" (crow) for his dark, wild hair and beard and penetrating eyes - succeeded his father at the age of 36, arriving as the most gifted military organizer in all creation. He would end it as one of the most tragic figures in medieval history. One wonders how history would have unfolded had he lived longer.
Setting the tone for his reign, Raimond-Berenguié's first act was to call for a grand joust, presiding over a great tourney in the spring of 885. As summer turned to autumn of 885, he called his nobles to Toulouse for a grand hunt, grabbing a spear and doing battle with boars of his own accord and emerging from it exhilarated and fresh. He wound down the year with a great feast in the royal hall in Toulouse, piling on a great waterfall of drink and imprisoning Mayor Ermengau after he slit the throat of a clumsy servant, while befriending Mayor Sancho of Elna over too many tankards of mead.
Eager to grow closer to God, Raimond-Berenguié took ship in the early months of 886, bound for Jerusalem, then under the sway of the Abbasid Caliphate. When he returned, he embarked upon a great program of building across the royal demesne. Ports, keeps, walls and shipyards were established across the land as the new king sought to strengthen his domain, and he returned some of the traditional prerogatives of his vassals to them, seeing too many of them beginning to adopt primogeniture for him to be entirely at ease.
As the 890s turned into being, Aquitaine roused to defend Asturias against the Moors, only to find the Asturian king already inking the terms of his surrender and submission to the Umayyad Emir. Irked at the capitulation of his ally, Raimond-Berenguié sent swift rider to Cordoba that Asturias would be his, in the name of the Savior, and raised his levies to war in Cantabria. By May of 892, Aquitanian men-at-arms had driven the Saracens from Castile and Asturias de Oviedo in the name of the King of Santiago, and the House de Cantabria was reinstalled and sworn to the Protectors of the Way of St. James. (Thanks, console.)
As he passed into his early fifties, Raimond-Berenguié grew increasingly infirm, his body beginning to betray him after too many years of being strained and battered by hunt, drink and joust. Already resenting the weakness and weariness besetting the flesh of his body, the King ultimately lapsed into a deep depression following the death of his wife, Wisigarda. Beset by loneliness, plagued by loathing of his body's growing weakness and frailty, and brought low by despair at the loss of his beloved companion and consort, the king took shelter in his tower in Toulouse. Finally, after six months of despair, Raimond-Berenguié sipped from a cup of poisoned wine and passed on the 20th of August, shocking his realm. That so promising a man could take his own life at just the age of 53 left many in the court in disbelief.
Eager to grow closer to God, Raimond-Berenguié took ship in the early months of 886, bound for Jerusalem, then under the sway of the Abbasid Caliphate. When he returned, he embarked upon a great program of building across the royal demesne. Ports, keeps, walls and shipyards were established across the land as the new king sought to strengthen his domain, and he returned some of the traditional prerogatives of his vassals to them, seeing too many of them beginning to adopt primogeniture for him to be entirely at ease.
As the 890s turned into being, Aquitaine roused to defend Asturias against the Moors, only to find the Asturian king already inking the terms of his surrender and submission to the Umayyad Emir. Irked at the capitulation of his ally, Raimond-Berenguié sent swift rider to Cordoba that Asturias would be his, in the name of the Savior, and raised his levies to war in Cantabria. By May of 892, Aquitanian men-at-arms had driven the Saracens from Castile and Asturias de Oviedo in the name of the King of Santiago, and the House de Cantabria was reinstalled and sworn to the Protectors of the Way of St. James. (Thanks, console.)
As he passed into his early fifties, Raimond-Berenguié grew increasingly infirm, his body beginning to betray him after too many years of being strained and battered by hunt, drink and joust. Already resenting the weakness and weariness besetting the flesh of his body, the King ultimately lapsed into a deep depression following the death of his wife, Wisigarda. Beset by loneliness, plagued by loathing of his body's growing weakness and frailty, and brought low by despair at the loss of his beloved companion and consort, the king took shelter in his tower in Toulouse. Finally, after six months of despair, Raimond-Berenguié sipped from a cup of poisoned wine and passed on the 20th of August, shocking his realm. That so promising a man could take his own life at just the age of 53 left many in the court in disbelief.
Planet of Hats
Donor
This is probably chugging towards a premature end what with Jade Dragon coming out and sure to change the map enough to break saves. Alas.
* Berenguié-Raimond II, or Berenguié-Raimond the Towhead, or Berenguié-Raimond the Wise
King of Aquitaine (Aug. 20, 902 - Jan. 14, 942)
Berenguié-Raimond II took the throne still devastated by his father's suicide. Outwardly regal and strong before his vassals, a patient and just man with a heart deeply given to God, internally the 25-year-old king was wracked with anguish and unanswered questions. Furthermore, his vassals viewed him with some wariness, uncertain if he was ready and suspecting that he might follow the path of his father in taking his own life in a fit of despair.
* Berenguié-Raimond II, or Berenguié-Raimond the Towhead, or Berenguié-Raimond the Wise
King of Aquitaine (Aug. 20, 902 - Jan. 14, 942)
Berenguié-Raimond II took the throne still devastated by his father's suicide. Outwardly regal and strong before his vassals, a patient and just man with a heart deeply given to God, internally the 25-year-old king was wracked with anguish and unanswered questions. Furthermore, his vassals viewed him with some wariness, uncertain if he was ready and suspecting that he might follow the path of his father in taking his own life in a fit of despair.
Some months after his coronation, still tormented, Berenguié-Raimond and his wife, the Bolghar noblewoman Usunbike of Achaia, welcomed his second daughter, Cecilia, into the world just before Yuletide. He resolved to lift the hearts of his vassals with a great feast in honour of new life, there on the birthday of the Saviour. The call was put out, and the lords of Aquitaine came to Melgueil, where the new king debuted his daughter and introduced the lords to his six-year-old son, Raimond-Berenguié. The lords returned home at the turn of the year, their spirits lifted and their hearts renewed.
Thus uplifted, and with a new sense of purpose, Berenguié-Raimond mustered the levies of Aquitaine and placed Baron Guillabert of Castelnaudry at the head of the army, and the men made march to Navarre, where Count Buhedoc of Broerec struggled to make headway against the Moors in his war to reclaim the Basque Country for Christendom.
With his men at war in the valley of the Ebro, Berenguié-Raimond turned to the study of philosophy. He immersed himself in ancient texts recovered from Valencia decades ago, even learning Arabic to read a translation of Socrates wrested from a Moorish library. Through learning of the death of Socrates, the young king began to come to grips with his own father's taking of poison, and he slowly came to accept what had happened. Along with scholarship, he found solace in the arms of his queen, the patient and kind-hearted Leubovera of Saint-Omer. Through learning and love, Berenguié-Raimond emerged from the shadows of despair, finally warming again even as his soldiers stormed the gates of Zaragoza in the summer of 904. By the time the leaves began to turn, Navarre lay in the hands of Count Buhedoc, and the levies of Aquitaine marched home.
His coffers topfilled with burgher taxes and Moorish gold, Berenguié-Raimond embarked upon a series of building programs in 905. The king being an avid jouster, he ordered jousting lists be built in the fortified keeps and castles of the land, and that good men of noble account muster themselves as mounted cavalrymen, to defend the land stoutly from Aquitaine's foes. That summer, he held a great tourney in Toulouse, which was won by a Basque duellist, Zentulo of Alava.
Settling in from there for a few peaceful years, Berenguié-Raimond was blessed with a great harvest across Aquitaine in 907, thanking God for Aquitaine's fortune in a grand visit to the Cathedral of Lavaur. It is around this time that the monarch seems to have begun writing, becoming one of the first noble poets in Aquitainian history. Much of Berenguié-Raimond II's poetry survives to this day.
In 910, Berenguié-Raimond responded to a call for distress from King Quedulfus of Santiago. Placing his brother Jacme at the head of the host of Aquitaine, the king sent his men into Iberia, where they drove the Moorish host from Burgos. On the field in the Central Range, Jacme and his guard punched through the Andalusian lines and slew Emir Sadiq the Usurper, helping to buy peace for Santiago and throwing al-Andalus into chaos as the Umayyads took the oppportunity to try and wrest their throne from the Karimid usurper's infant son. As al-Andalus seethed with revolt, with the infant Ali ibn Sadiq warding off two Umayyad claimants and the Count of Asturias de Oviedo, Berenguié-Raimond moved into the Pyrenees and seized the church town of Barbastro, establishing control over High Aragon. The county was turned over to a churchman, Prince-Bishop Bernat-Guillem.
The land was peaceful through to the early 920s, aside from the crown moving to strip the Duke of Provence of his holdings in Auvergne.
In 926, seeking to break up the Carolingian hegemony in northern Gaul and Germania, Berenguié-Raimond intervened in Duke Joran of Thuringia's rebellion against King Guillaume the Fat of Burgundy and East Francia, seeking to place Dietwin Sieghardinger, grandson of Karloman III, on the throne of the Germanic kingdom. As luck would have it, the host of Aquitaine found Burgundy's host descending from the Alps to besiege Geneva. After storming the gates of Aosta and Tarentaise, the proud Occitan men-at-arms descended from the foothills and butchered the Burgundian host nearly to a man, capturing Prince-Archbishop Amedee of Savoy, and seeing Dietwin installed as King of Germany by the turning of autumn.
Over all this loomed a troubling family quandary. Berenguié-Raimond's son, Raimond-Berenguié, no genius but nevertheless a man of great martial account, had been sore afflicted by an odd pox of the genitals some years before, and the illness had of late driven him to fits of lunacy and madness. The young man caused many a scandal at court with his incoherent outbursts and garbled diatribes about nonsense. His son's sheer prowess in battle had seen him through many a conflict at the head of the army, avoiding the good death that many hoped to see him to, and an effort to put him on a boat and send him on a trip to the lands of the Norse proved useless, with Raimond-Berenguié just ordering the ship home while gibbering something about the Kraken. Finally, at his wit's end, Berenguié-Raimond enrolled his son as a missionary in 929 and sent him to Estonia to preach the word of the Lord to the heathen Finnic pagans, hoping that he would find God somewhere in the icy north. He never saw his son again, and word came the next year that he died of his illness, raving delusionally in a fetid pit of a prison somewhere in frigid Estonia. Berenguié-Raimond bowed his head and mourned.
But all was not shadow, and the king's grandson, young Berenguié-Raimond III, showed the same uncommon brilliance of his grandfather, the same genius so lacking in his father. Already at the age of eight, he was nearly his grandfather's equal in skullduggery and scholarly learning. The king undertook to tutor his young namesake, hoping to hang on to life for another eight years until the lad reached his majority.
The seasons turned, and Berenguié-Raimond undertook a program of hospital construction across Aquitaine, supplementing it with a wave of infrastructure-building in the counties of the Marca Hispaniae. While word came on Yuletide of 933 of the fall of Castile to the Moors, Berenguié-Raimond paid it little mind, focused instead on the raising of his grandson and heir. He took time out in 934 to walk the Way of St. James, passing through Muslim-occupied Castile under guard. Soon enough, by 936, the work of his predecessors came to full flower, as the Duchy of Provence came to be recognized as a de jure holding of Aquitaine, Pope Clement III simply dismissing the King of Burgundy's paltry claim to that land.
In 937, young Berenguié-Raimond III came of age, showing every bit the promise of his youth - zealous and direct, yet patient and outgoing. He was ensconced in Toulouse as his grandfather's co-ruler and regent, taking a Genoese maiden to wife.
With Leon weakened by the loss of Castile, Berenguié-Raimond, now past his sixtieth year, called his men to battle to wrest that land from the besieged Umayyad Emir. The war was over in the span of a year, Occitan and Catalan men-at-arms storming castles, cities and monasteries still weakened from the Moorish invasion, with populations waiting eagerly for rescue. By the summer of 939, Castile was returned to the Iberians, and the newly-created Duke Fernando Fernandez swore fealty to King Damiro the Great of Leon.
On January 14, 942, Berenguié-Raimond finally passed in his sleep, his troops in the field fighting to keep Germany in the hands of the Sieghardingers.
Thus uplifted, and with a new sense of purpose, Berenguié-Raimond mustered the levies of Aquitaine and placed Baron Guillabert of Castelnaudry at the head of the army, and the men made march to Navarre, where Count Buhedoc of Broerec struggled to make headway against the Moors in his war to reclaim the Basque Country for Christendom.
With his men at war in the valley of the Ebro, Berenguié-Raimond turned to the study of philosophy. He immersed himself in ancient texts recovered from Valencia decades ago, even learning Arabic to read a translation of Socrates wrested from a Moorish library. Through learning of the death of Socrates, the young king began to come to grips with his own father's taking of poison, and he slowly came to accept what had happened. Along with scholarship, he found solace in the arms of his queen, the patient and kind-hearted Leubovera of Saint-Omer. Through learning and love, Berenguié-Raimond emerged from the shadows of despair, finally warming again even as his soldiers stormed the gates of Zaragoza in the summer of 904. By the time the leaves began to turn, Navarre lay in the hands of Count Buhedoc, and the levies of Aquitaine marched home.
His coffers topfilled with burgher taxes and Moorish gold, Berenguié-Raimond embarked upon a series of building programs in 905. The king being an avid jouster, he ordered jousting lists be built in the fortified keeps and castles of the land, and that good men of noble account muster themselves as mounted cavalrymen, to defend the land stoutly from Aquitaine's foes. That summer, he held a great tourney in Toulouse, which was won by a Basque duellist, Zentulo of Alava.
Settling in from there for a few peaceful years, Berenguié-Raimond was blessed with a great harvest across Aquitaine in 907, thanking God for Aquitaine's fortune in a grand visit to the Cathedral of Lavaur. It is around this time that the monarch seems to have begun writing, becoming one of the first noble poets in Aquitainian history. Much of Berenguié-Raimond II's poetry survives to this day.
In 910, Berenguié-Raimond responded to a call for distress from King Quedulfus of Santiago. Placing his brother Jacme at the head of the host of Aquitaine, the king sent his men into Iberia, where they drove the Moorish host from Burgos. On the field in the Central Range, Jacme and his guard punched through the Andalusian lines and slew Emir Sadiq the Usurper, helping to buy peace for Santiago and throwing al-Andalus into chaos as the Umayyads took the oppportunity to try and wrest their throne from the Karimid usurper's infant son. As al-Andalus seethed with revolt, with the infant Ali ibn Sadiq warding off two Umayyad claimants and the Count of Asturias de Oviedo, Berenguié-Raimond moved into the Pyrenees and seized the church town of Barbastro, establishing control over High Aragon. The county was turned over to a churchman, Prince-Bishop Bernat-Guillem.
The land was peaceful through to the early 920s, aside from the crown moving to strip the Duke of Provence of his holdings in Auvergne.
In 926, seeking to break up the Carolingian hegemony in northern Gaul and Germania, Berenguié-Raimond intervened in Duke Joran of Thuringia's rebellion against King Guillaume the Fat of Burgundy and East Francia, seeking to place Dietwin Sieghardinger, grandson of Karloman III, on the throne of the Germanic kingdom. As luck would have it, the host of Aquitaine found Burgundy's host descending from the Alps to besiege Geneva. After storming the gates of Aosta and Tarentaise, the proud Occitan men-at-arms descended from the foothills and butchered the Burgundian host nearly to a man, capturing Prince-Archbishop Amedee of Savoy, and seeing Dietwin installed as King of Germany by the turning of autumn.
Over all this loomed a troubling family quandary. Berenguié-Raimond's son, Raimond-Berenguié, no genius but nevertheless a man of great martial account, had been sore afflicted by an odd pox of the genitals some years before, and the illness had of late driven him to fits of lunacy and madness. The young man caused many a scandal at court with his incoherent outbursts and garbled diatribes about nonsense. His son's sheer prowess in battle had seen him through many a conflict at the head of the army, avoiding the good death that many hoped to see him to, and an effort to put him on a boat and send him on a trip to the lands of the Norse proved useless, with Raimond-Berenguié just ordering the ship home while gibbering something about the Kraken. Finally, at his wit's end, Berenguié-Raimond enrolled his son as a missionary in 929 and sent him to Estonia to preach the word of the Lord to the heathen Finnic pagans, hoping that he would find God somewhere in the icy north. He never saw his son again, and word came the next year that he died of his illness, raving delusionally in a fetid pit of a prison somewhere in frigid Estonia. Berenguié-Raimond bowed his head and mourned.
But all was not shadow, and the king's grandson, young Berenguié-Raimond III, showed the same uncommon brilliance of his grandfather, the same genius so lacking in his father. Already at the age of eight, he was nearly his grandfather's equal in skullduggery and scholarly learning. The king undertook to tutor his young namesake, hoping to hang on to life for another eight years until the lad reached his majority.
The seasons turned, and Berenguié-Raimond undertook a program of hospital construction across Aquitaine, supplementing it with a wave of infrastructure-building in the counties of the Marca Hispaniae. While word came on Yuletide of 933 of the fall of Castile to the Moors, Berenguié-Raimond paid it little mind, focused instead on the raising of his grandson and heir. He took time out in 934 to walk the Way of St. James, passing through Muslim-occupied Castile under guard. Soon enough, by 936, the work of his predecessors came to full flower, as the Duchy of Provence came to be recognized as a de jure holding of Aquitaine, Pope Clement III simply dismissing the King of Burgundy's paltry claim to that land.
In 937, young Berenguié-Raimond III came of age, showing every bit the promise of his youth - zealous and direct, yet patient and outgoing. He was ensconced in Toulouse as his grandfather's co-ruler and regent, taking a Genoese maiden to wife.
With Leon weakened by the loss of Castile, Berenguié-Raimond, now past his sixtieth year, called his men to battle to wrest that land from the besieged Umayyad Emir. The war was over in the span of a year, Occitan and Catalan men-at-arms storming castles, cities and monasteries still weakened from the Moorish invasion, with populations waiting eagerly for rescue. By the summer of 939, Castile was returned to the Iberians, and the newly-created Duke Fernando Fernandez swore fealty to King Damiro the Great of Leon.
On January 14, 942, Berenguié-Raimond finally passed in his sleep, his troops in the field fighting to keep Germany in the hands of the Sieghardingers.
Im just gonna count down the days until we get a von Hapsburg on the throne of China. You can be the Hapbsburgs in later bookmarks right?
You can even start as the Haspburgs in 1066 by playing Werner von Habsurg, count of Aargau.
Emperor Glitterhoof is not the Emperor China wanted, but rather the Emperor China NEEDED!
Planet of Hats
Donor
I have four sons at the moment. Only one is not a genius. It's the firstborn.
It's times like this I wish CK2 let you easily disinherit your heir. Would love to shove him into a bishopric.
It's times like this I wish CK2 let you easily disinherit your heir. Would love to shove him into a bishopric.
What I do is try and get him killed and if that doesn't work I simply don't get him married, then I become one of his bros after trying to kill myself.
Cant you send your heir to the church? Grant them a temple barony and I think they should be disinherited.
Planet of Hats
Donor
Another of these.
* Berenguié-Raimond III, or Berenguié-Raimond the Troubadour, or Berenguié-Raimond the Cuckold
King of Aquitaine (Jan. 14, 942 - March 7, 975)
Prince of Holland (972 - March 7, 975)
Berenguié-Raimond III came to the throne just days after his unfaithful wife bore someone else's bastard daughter. Rather than imprison or execute her, he forgave her, then took her to church and prayed for her soul - but disowned the child. Perhaps that's why he came to the throne as the least prestigious king in Aquitaine's history, mocked by contemporary scribes in the first years of his reign and written of as a weakling and a cuckold. Even in the later years of his reign, his nobles considered him unmanly in his personal affairs.
* Berenguié-Raimond III, or Berenguié-Raimond the Troubadour, or Berenguié-Raimond the Cuckold
King of Aquitaine (Jan. 14, 942 - March 7, 975)
Prince of Holland (972 - March 7, 975)
Berenguié-Raimond III came to the throne just days after his unfaithful wife bore someone else's bastard daughter. Rather than imprison or execute her, he forgave her, then took her to church and prayed for her soul - but disowned the child. Perhaps that's why he came to the throne as the least prestigious king in Aquitaine's history, mocked by contemporary scribes in the first years of his reign and written of as a weakling and a cuckold. Even in the later years of his reign, his nobles considered him unmanly in his personal affairs.
In 948, Berenguié-Raimond completed a three-year war to place Sergio de Pitigliano, an Italian, on the throne of Italy, toppling the Lombards and restoring that kingdom to its rightful inhabitants. At the same time, King Dietwin of Germany had called Aquitaine to war in the Alps, seeking to liberate Bavaria from the heathen Khazar horde of Khagan Bulan the Cruel. Aquitanian troops put down a rebellion of Lombards and a foray by a German duke into Aquileia, then wheeled north to narrowly help King Dietwin wrest western Bavaria from the Khazars days before a vast horde of Tengri heathens on horseback was due to descend upon the Christian host and slaughter them to a man. Twenty thousand Khazars arrived to find the ink already dry on a treaty of peace and the liberated Germans stout behind their walls.
Broadly, those first ten years were spent protecting Aquitaine's allies in Germany and Italy against the predations of the hated Carolingians of West Francia. Long discontent with the domination of the descendants of Charlemagne north of his borders, Berenguié-Raimond continued his predecessors' policy of smashing the Franks' hegemony over Europe, returning native dynasties to power wherever possible.
Again Aquitaine roused in 953 to aid King Dietwin in returning Wurzburg to German control, returning home from a short successful war in 954. Berenguié-Raimond had barely returned home to rest when King Sergio of Italy called for aid in a holy war in North Africa. Far from intending to shuttle his men across the Mediterranean to compete with the Berbers for the central Maghreb, Berenguié-Raimond sent word of his consent, but his men marched instead to Zaragoza to lay waste to the fortresses of the Emir Abdullah, who had promised his aid to the Zurayid Emir, Sa'adaddin the Cruel. With the Nadirids of Zaragoza embroiled in a regional rebellion, their armies in the field, the men of Aquitaine easily stormed the strongholds of northeastern al-Andalus, carrying away wealth and prisoners en masse. It's said that among these prisoners were architects who inspired later pseudo-Moorish architectural techniques in Occitan public works projects over the next few years.
As the men stormed Zaragoza, word came from King Dietwin of rebellion at the hands of Count Hildebold of Breisgau, seeking to place King Othon of West Francia on the German throne. The armies of Aquitaine quickly wheeled north and trudged towards Germany, making a perilous crossing of the Alps over Yuletide of 955. The host, under Baron Bartoumieu of Manresa, split in half, one group storming the rebel stronghold at Freiburg, the other pursuing Hildebold's host into the Alps and forcing their surrender at the Battle of Heiligenburg.
As he welcomed his kinsman Bartoumieu home, word came in 956 of the surrender of King Guillaume of Burgundy to a rebel faction demanding the union of Burgundy and Germany. Just two months after accepting the crown, however, King Dietwin died in his sleep, his 12-year-old son Adalbert taking the throne. Berenguié-Raimond quickly moved to renew the alliance between Aquitaine and Germany, knowing that the avaricious Karling King of Francia would see an opportunity to make his move against the House Sieghardinger.
Word came over Yuletide of 957 that Berenguié-Raimond's cousin, Vicenc, had made his way to Vienne, there to assemble a vast army of hired men-at-arms in the hopes of seizing the throne of Aquitaine for himself. As Aquitaine massed to meet the impending threat, King Adalbert of Germany pleaded with Berenguié-Raimond to come to his aid against a rebellion seeking to return Burgundy to the control of a Karling candidate. However, the candidate - Prince Thiebaut - being bound by marriage to Berenguié-Raimond's house, the King sent word that he would honour the alliance - but his troops made no move to do so, merely assembling in Toulouse to await Vicenc's host.
In July of 959, a year after the death of Pope Victor II, curious news reached Toulouse. So reviled was the pontiff that his successor, Pope Victor III, had Victor II's corpse removed from its tomb, dressed in the papal vestments and brought posthumously to trial, with a deacon chosen to stand behind the throne to present its defense. The corpse was found guilty of pilfering the tithes of the faithful, of dabbling in dark magicks and of sodomy, then castrated, stripped of its vestments, severed of its right-hand fingers and buried in a pauper's grave, then exhumed three days later and cast into the Tiber. While the King's son, young Raimond-Berenguié, was shocked by this, Berenguié-Raimond, busy preparing for the host of Vicenc, simply expressed his assurance that the Cardinals had acted wisely.
Finally, Vicenc made his move, marching into the March of Gothia with nearly 17,000 men - enough to take most any kingdom in Europe at the time. But Aquitaine, with so much land under the direct control of the Royal Marches in order to provide a bulwark against Moorish invasion, was not just any kingdom. Berenguié-Raimond's host was larger by at least 8,000 men, and swelled by the addition of mercenaries from Transjurania to bring Aquitaine's host to nearly 28,000 strong. Vicenc split off some five thousand men to besiege the Prince-Bishopric of Vivarais; Berenguié-Raimond quickly descended on the centre of Vicenc's host at Gevaudan and crushed it at the Battle of Mende. Vicenc quickly rushed his reserves into the battle, but by then it was too late; nearly ten thousand of Vicenc's mercenaries lay dead on the field at Mende, and the armies of Aquitaine, led by the King's kinsmen, Bartoumieu and Jordain, and by the mercenary captain Adalbert, pursued Vicenc into Transjurania. There, they crushed the host and took Vicenc prisoner.
While the prospect of sending Vicenc away without a coin to his name appealed to Berenguié-Raimond, his cousin's ambition and envy ran deep. Berenguié-Raimond instead hurled his cousin into a pit and left him to die. Then, as a wave of smallpox ravaged the March of Gothia, the host of Aquitaine turned south again to bring battle to the Moors in the ongoing Italian quagmire in the Mountains of Atlas. Meanwhile, Vicenc was mysteriously killed after somehow escaping the oubliette. Berenguié-Raimond clucked his tongue and shook his head, wondering how on earth that ever could've happened.
Berenguié-Raimond inherited the holdings of Achaia in mid-961, when his mother, the Bolghar noblewoman Usunbike the Wise, died - though in fact Achaia had long been a possession of the Saracens, with Berenguié-Raimond's new title only including several cities in Epirus and a Bolghar lord ruling over Nicaea. Struggling with the onset of smallpox at the time, the King considered what to do with these lands in Bolghar Greece, seeking a relative to which to grant them. The Count of Nicaea was allowed to return to the vassalage of the Bulgar king, but his mother's holdings in Epirus were granted to a cousin, Raimond-Berenguié, who was created Duke of Achaia and Count of Epirus.
Disease swept the land through 962 and 963, with camp fever ravaging western Aquitaine. Further, King Sergio was dethroned in Italy in a palace coup which restored the hated Lombards to power. Tied into a futile North African war he wanted no part of, Berenguié-Raimond exhorted King Ferdulf of Italy to sue for the white peace, to no avail. With the war in Burgundy similarly a quagmire, Berenguié-Raimond sighed, then mustered his men to finally break that rebellion, Duke Etienne being taken prisoner by the early days of 964.
Weary in such trying times, Berenguié-Raimond took up the lute, developing a taste for both poetry and song. He soon became an avid singer and player, often playing in the throne room or on the road. Berenguié-Raimond became Aquitaine's first noble troubadour, an epithet by which he is known today.
With Aquitaine at peace for the first time in nigh-on twenty years, Berenguié-Raimond set his mind to thoughts of rebuilding his empire and spreading the arts - but part of his thoughts remained upon his plans to undermine the Karlings. His chancellor, Mayor Godafres, roamed the lands of Frisia, building a case for war.
The peace was short-lived, though, as Aquitaine was obliged to join Germany in a foolish war to free the Osterreich from Khazar nomads. However, the Aquitanian host - while badly depleted in running battles with Khazar cavalry - used crossings of the Danube to its advantage, turning the tide on the Khazar host by forcing to attack across the river, then winning a narrow victory and delivering the lands back to the Germans. Only a third of Aquitaine's men returned from that horrific battle, fully ten thousand left dead on the field. About five seconds later, Aquitaine, still badly wounded by that Pyrrhic victory, was obliged again to war in Germany to quell the revolt of Count Hildebert, while Berenguié-Raimond was obliged to pay out vast sums of gold to his vassals to stay the hands of a faction seeking to use that vulnerable moment to place a pretender on the throne. These bribes worked, and Aquitaine licked its wounds without internal squabbling.
In 970, Berenguié-Raimond made his move, declaring war on the kings of both Austrasia and West Francia and moving to invade Frisia. He presented the Frankish kings with a document he claimed to be a plea for aid from the people of the Low Countries, weaving tall tales of horrendous French taxation and barons ravishing the virgin daughters of innocent burghers. In reality this seems to have been spurious, with most of the land being French and the only Low Franconians actually riding with the Occitan host being a preacher and rabble-rouser named Hendrik van Loon and a hard-hearted merchant named Folbert van Bonen. The truth was that the invasion was intended to begin to separate Frisia from the Carolingian and Capetian dominions and cultivate it as a kingdom all its own. Soon, Austrasia was driven from its scant holdings in the region, and West Francia quickly collapsed before the Aquitanian men-at-arms, who experienced wild success as they swept into Flanders and drove the Carolingians out at swordpoint - even as Mayor Godafres spun yet another legal fiction at the last minute and at great expense, a scroll full of overblown stories of the plight of the people of Flanders and the robbery of its duchy title from its rightful lords. Forcing King Othon to terms, Berenguié-Raimond proclaimed himself Prince of Holland and Protector of the Frisian Lowlands, with Folbert being created Duke of Flanders and Hendrik Duke of Holland. A third man, the zealous colonel Jacco van Sulzbach, was made Duke of Gelre.
Completing the conquest in 972, Berenguié-Raimond called a grand tourney in Sluys that summer, and was delighted when his son and heir, Raimond-Berenguié, came in second place, losing only to Duke Lop of Aquitaine after a truly epic joust.
In 973, Berenguié-Raimond stripped Duchess Ruothilde Capet of Bourbon of her holdings in Nevers, seeking to rein in the power of the last Frank in Aquitaine. Ruothilde responded hotly and raised her troops, and Aquitanian troops poured into Nevers, breaking her down within the space of a year. Refusing Berenguié-Raimond's demand that she submit to arrest, she closed the gates of Bourbon, and Berenguié-Raimond was obliged to send men to retrieve her in chains. She was stripped of her land, with Nevers granted to a kinsman, Jorge, son of the rebel Vicenc. Berenguié-Raimond then created his brother Robert as Duke of Bourbon and installed him in the north.
With the former King Sergio of Italy now overthrown by Lombards and reduced to one county in the Duchy of Ancona, Berenguié-Raimond renewed the alliance with the deposed monarch, moving to aid him in his war for Urbino. But the turning of the seasons in 974 left Berenguié-Raimond weakened, and as winter of 975 raged on, he grew tired, eventually succumbing in his sleep before the dawning of spring, his men still at war in Ancona.
Broadly, those first ten years were spent protecting Aquitaine's allies in Germany and Italy against the predations of the hated Carolingians of West Francia. Long discontent with the domination of the descendants of Charlemagne north of his borders, Berenguié-Raimond continued his predecessors' policy of smashing the Franks' hegemony over Europe, returning native dynasties to power wherever possible.
Again Aquitaine roused in 953 to aid King Dietwin in returning Wurzburg to German control, returning home from a short successful war in 954. Berenguié-Raimond had barely returned home to rest when King Sergio of Italy called for aid in a holy war in North Africa. Far from intending to shuttle his men across the Mediterranean to compete with the Berbers for the central Maghreb, Berenguié-Raimond sent word of his consent, but his men marched instead to Zaragoza to lay waste to the fortresses of the Emir Abdullah, who had promised his aid to the Zurayid Emir, Sa'adaddin the Cruel. With the Nadirids of Zaragoza embroiled in a regional rebellion, their armies in the field, the men of Aquitaine easily stormed the strongholds of northeastern al-Andalus, carrying away wealth and prisoners en masse. It's said that among these prisoners were architects who inspired later pseudo-Moorish architectural techniques in Occitan public works projects over the next few years.
As the men stormed Zaragoza, word came from King Dietwin of rebellion at the hands of Count Hildebold of Breisgau, seeking to place King Othon of West Francia on the German throne. The armies of Aquitaine quickly wheeled north and trudged towards Germany, making a perilous crossing of the Alps over Yuletide of 955. The host, under Baron Bartoumieu of Manresa, split in half, one group storming the rebel stronghold at Freiburg, the other pursuing Hildebold's host into the Alps and forcing their surrender at the Battle of Heiligenburg.
As he welcomed his kinsman Bartoumieu home, word came in 956 of the surrender of King Guillaume of Burgundy to a rebel faction demanding the union of Burgundy and Germany. Just two months after accepting the crown, however, King Dietwin died in his sleep, his 12-year-old son Adalbert taking the throne. Berenguié-Raimond quickly moved to renew the alliance between Aquitaine and Germany, knowing that the avaricious Karling King of Francia would see an opportunity to make his move against the House Sieghardinger.
Word came over Yuletide of 957 that Berenguié-Raimond's cousin, Vicenc, had made his way to Vienne, there to assemble a vast army of hired men-at-arms in the hopes of seizing the throne of Aquitaine for himself. As Aquitaine massed to meet the impending threat, King Adalbert of Germany pleaded with Berenguié-Raimond to come to his aid against a rebellion seeking to return Burgundy to the control of a Karling candidate. However, the candidate - Prince Thiebaut - being bound by marriage to Berenguié-Raimond's house, the King sent word that he would honour the alliance - but his troops made no move to do so, merely assembling in Toulouse to await Vicenc's host.
In July of 959, a year after the death of Pope Victor II, curious news reached Toulouse. So reviled was the pontiff that his successor, Pope Victor III, had Victor II's corpse removed from its tomb, dressed in the papal vestments and brought posthumously to trial, with a deacon chosen to stand behind the throne to present its defense. The corpse was found guilty of pilfering the tithes of the faithful, of dabbling in dark magicks and of sodomy, then castrated, stripped of its vestments, severed of its right-hand fingers and buried in a pauper's grave, then exhumed three days later and cast into the Tiber. While the King's son, young Raimond-Berenguié, was shocked by this, Berenguié-Raimond, busy preparing for the host of Vicenc, simply expressed his assurance that the Cardinals had acted wisely.
Finally, Vicenc made his move, marching into the March of Gothia with nearly 17,000 men - enough to take most any kingdom in Europe at the time. But Aquitaine, with so much land under the direct control of the Royal Marches in order to provide a bulwark against Moorish invasion, was not just any kingdom. Berenguié-Raimond's host was larger by at least 8,000 men, and swelled by the addition of mercenaries from Transjurania to bring Aquitaine's host to nearly 28,000 strong. Vicenc split off some five thousand men to besiege the Prince-Bishopric of Vivarais; Berenguié-Raimond quickly descended on the centre of Vicenc's host at Gevaudan and crushed it at the Battle of Mende. Vicenc quickly rushed his reserves into the battle, but by then it was too late; nearly ten thousand of Vicenc's mercenaries lay dead on the field at Mende, and the armies of Aquitaine, led by the King's kinsmen, Bartoumieu and Jordain, and by the mercenary captain Adalbert, pursued Vicenc into Transjurania. There, they crushed the host and took Vicenc prisoner.
While the prospect of sending Vicenc away without a coin to his name appealed to Berenguié-Raimond, his cousin's ambition and envy ran deep. Berenguié-Raimond instead hurled his cousin into a pit and left him to die. Then, as a wave of smallpox ravaged the March of Gothia, the host of Aquitaine turned south again to bring battle to the Moors in the ongoing Italian quagmire in the Mountains of Atlas. Meanwhile, Vicenc was mysteriously killed after somehow escaping the oubliette. Berenguié-Raimond clucked his tongue and shook his head, wondering how on earth that ever could've happened.
Berenguié-Raimond inherited the holdings of Achaia in mid-961, when his mother, the Bolghar noblewoman Usunbike the Wise, died - though in fact Achaia had long been a possession of the Saracens, with Berenguié-Raimond's new title only including several cities in Epirus and a Bolghar lord ruling over Nicaea. Struggling with the onset of smallpox at the time, the King considered what to do with these lands in Bolghar Greece, seeking a relative to which to grant them. The Count of Nicaea was allowed to return to the vassalage of the Bulgar king, but his mother's holdings in Epirus were granted to a cousin, Raimond-Berenguié, who was created Duke of Achaia and Count of Epirus.
Disease swept the land through 962 and 963, with camp fever ravaging western Aquitaine. Further, King Sergio was dethroned in Italy in a palace coup which restored the hated Lombards to power. Tied into a futile North African war he wanted no part of, Berenguié-Raimond exhorted King Ferdulf of Italy to sue for the white peace, to no avail. With the war in Burgundy similarly a quagmire, Berenguié-Raimond sighed, then mustered his men to finally break that rebellion, Duke Etienne being taken prisoner by the early days of 964.
Weary in such trying times, Berenguié-Raimond took up the lute, developing a taste for both poetry and song. He soon became an avid singer and player, often playing in the throne room or on the road. Berenguié-Raimond became Aquitaine's first noble troubadour, an epithet by which he is known today.
With Aquitaine at peace for the first time in nigh-on twenty years, Berenguié-Raimond set his mind to thoughts of rebuilding his empire and spreading the arts - but part of his thoughts remained upon his plans to undermine the Karlings. His chancellor, Mayor Godafres, roamed the lands of Frisia, building a case for war.
The peace was short-lived, though, as Aquitaine was obliged to join Germany in a foolish war to free the Osterreich from Khazar nomads. However, the Aquitanian host - while badly depleted in running battles with Khazar cavalry - used crossings of the Danube to its advantage, turning the tide on the Khazar host by forcing to attack across the river, then winning a narrow victory and delivering the lands back to the Germans. Only a third of Aquitaine's men returned from that horrific battle, fully ten thousand left dead on the field. About five seconds later, Aquitaine, still badly wounded by that Pyrrhic victory, was obliged again to war in Germany to quell the revolt of Count Hildebert, while Berenguié-Raimond was obliged to pay out vast sums of gold to his vassals to stay the hands of a faction seeking to use that vulnerable moment to place a pretender on the throne. These bribes worked, and Aquitaine licked its wounds without internal squabbling.
In 970, Berenguié-Raimond made his move, declaring war on the kings of both Austrasia and West Francia and moving to invade Frisia. He presented the Frankish kings with a document he claimed to be a plea for aid from the people of the Low Countries, weaving tall tales of horrendous French taxation and barons ravishing the virgin daughters of innocent burghers. In reality this seems to have been spurious, with most of the land being French and the only Low Franconians actually riding with the Occitan host being a preacher and rabble-rouser named Hendrik van Loon and a hard-hearted merchant named Folbert van Bonen. The truth was that the invasion was intended to begin to separate Frisia from the Carolingian and Capetian dominions and cultivate it as a kingdom all its own. Soon, Austrasia was driven from its scant holdings in the region, and West Francia quickly collapsed before the Aquitanian men-at-arms, who experienced wild success as they swept into Flanders and drove the Carolingians out at swordpoint - even as Mayor Godafres spun yet another legal fiction at the last minute and at great expense, a scroll full of overblown stories of the plight of the people of Flanders and the robbery of its duchy title from its rightful lords. Forcing King Othon to terms, Berenguié-Raimond proclaimed himself Prince of Holland and Protector of the Frisian Lowlands, with Folbert being created Duke of Flanders and Hendrik Duke of Holland. A third man, the zealous colonel Jacco van Sulzbach, was made Duke of Gelre.
Completing the conquest in 972, Berenguié-Raimond called a grand tourney in Sluys that summer, and was delighted when his son and heir, Raimond-Berenguié, came in second place, losing only to Duke Lop of Aquitaine after a truly epic joust.
In 973, Berenguié-Raimond stripped Duchess Ruothilde Capet of Bourbon of her holdings in Nevers, seeking to rein in the power of the last Frank in Aquitaine. Ruothilde responded hotly and raised her troops, and Aquitanian troops poured into Nevers, breaking her down within the space of a year. Refusing Berenguié-Raimond's demand that she submit to arrest, she closed the gates of Bourbon, and Berenguié-Raimond was obliged to send men to retrieve her in chains. She was stripped of her land, with Nevers granted to a kinsman, Jorge, son of the rebel Vicenc. Berenguié-Raimond then created his brother Robert as Duke of Bourbon and installed him in the north.
With the former King Sergio of Italy now overthrown by Lombards and reduced to one county in the Duchy of Ancona, Berenguié-Raimond renewed the alliance with the deposed monarch, moving to aid him in his war for Urbino. But the turning of the seasons in 974 left Berenguié-Raimond weakened, and as winter of 975 raged on, he grew tired, eventually succumbing in his sleep before the dawning of spring, his men still at war in Ancona.
I decided to try my hand at Century of Blood and had Aurion make the trip to Valyria, the good news is that he was successful and then I had become Emperor of New Valyria, things were going well with his new wives, he had a son and daughter. Then in the third year of his reign there was a huge outbreak out Bloody Flux that forced the court into seclusion.
Then we ran out of food and despite eating rats and people, Emperor Aurion died and was succeeded by his 1 year old son Aurion II. Then his sister died of 'poor health' and the realm erupted in a huge rebellion to overthrow Aurion II and replace him with the old Triarchs, then the brat got sick with bloody flux and died.
So that's how that went...
Then we ran out of food and despite eating rats and people, Emperor Aurion died and was succeeded by his 1 year old son Aurion II. Then his sister died of 'poor health' and the realm erupted in a huge rebellion to overthrow Aurion II and replace him with the old Triarchs, then the brat got sick with bloody flux and died.
So that's how that went...
Now I decided to try the Dance of the Dragons as Aegon II, long story short due to the game mechanics Aegon II was facing the Lord Paramounts of the North, the Riverlands, the Vale, and the Iron Islands and his allies were a few minor lords, the Stormlands, and that's it.
It didn't help that his forces lost their battles against the invading Vale forces, then Rhaenyra showed up and she and Aegon danced their dragons and Sunfyre was killed and Aegon II was severely injured AND captured... But died in Rhaenyra's dungeons the NEXT DAY which erased most of her progress.
Jaehaerys II then had to deal with this clusterfuck as more and more of the Crownlands was occupied by the unchecked Ironborn and the Riverlands... Then Rhaenyra was assassinated by Alicent Hightower, Daemon Targaryen died of Greyscale, and Rhaenyra's claim fell on Lucerys... who also had greyscale AND was stressed AND injured. He died three days after his mother, Joffrey picked up the claim but he was already imprisoned by Borros Baratheon, thus ending the war...
Until it came time to sort out the peace and I decided not to forgive certain lords, which detonated several minor rebellions that were a bitch to put down, meanwhile Aemond Targaryen AND Hugh Hammer both launched invasions to try and seize the Iron Throne...
At this point I almost gave up... Until Hugh Hammer was murdered by his wife Nettles because he had had an affair with some minor courtier, then Aemond Targaryen was slowed down by several vassals of the Baratheons who decided to join my wars, which weakened his forces and caused him to be maimed.
I was able to lure him into a bad spot with my remaining forces (augmented with mercenaries) and Criston Cole managed to defeat Aemond's armies, forcing him to surrender, I then stuffed him in he oubliette and he died within two months.
The rebels were put down, but due to Jaehaerys II being a minor he couldn't seize their lands like I wanted him too, and one by one the lords either died or escaped before he could reach his majority.
But in the meanwhile Jaehaerys grew up into a patient, cruel, deceitful, and arbitrary young man married to his sister Jaehaera. As of right now Jaehaerys II has two children, Aelinor and Maekar, Aelinor has the attractive trait and BOTH are insane.
It didn't help that his forces lost their battles against the invading Vale forces, then Rhaenyra showed up and she and Aegon danced their dragons and Sunfyre was killed and Aegon II was severely injured AND captured... But died in Rhaenyra's dungeons the NEXT DAY which erased most of her progress.
Jaehaerys II then had to deal with this clusterfuck as more and more of the Crownlands was occupied by the unchecked Ironborn and the Riverlands... Then Rhaenyra was assassinated by Alicent Hightower, Daemon Targaryen died of Greyscale, and Rhaenyra's claim fell on Lucerys... who also had greyscale AND was stressed AND injured. He died three days after his mother, Joffrey picked up the claim but he was already imprisoned by Borros Baratheon, thus ending the war...
Until it came time to sort out the peace and I decided not to forgive certain lords, which detonated several minor rebellions that were a bitch to put down, meanwhile Aemond Targaryen AND Hugh Hammer both launched invasions to try and seize the Iron Throne...
At this point I almost gave up... Until Hugh Hammer was murdered by his wife Nettles because he had had an affair with some minor courtier, then Aemond Targaryen was slowed down by several vassals of the Baratheons who decided to join my wars, which weakened his forces and caused him to be maimed.
I was able to lure him into a bad spot with my remaining forces (augmented with mercenaries) and Criston Cole managed to defeat Aemond's armies, forcing him to surrender, I then stuffed him in he oubliette and he died within two months.
The rebels were put down, but due to Jaehaerys II being a minor he couldn't seize their lands like I wanted him too, and one by one the lords either died or escaped before he could reach his majority.
But in the meanwhile Jaehaerys grew up into a patient, cruel, deceitful, and arbitrary young man married to his sister Jaehaera. As of right now Jaehaerys II has two children, Aelinor and Maekar, Aelinor has the attractive trait and BOTH are insane.
Planet of Hats
Donor
Another of these....
* Raimond-Berenguié II, or Raimond-Berenguié the Great
King of Aquitaine (March 7, 975 - Jan. 28, 1011)
King of Jerusalem (June 26, 986 - March 18, 1008)
Prince of Holland (March 7, 975 - April 26, 990)
Coming to the throne at age 27 and profoundly influenced in his religious views by the infamous Cadaver Synod, Raimond-Berenguié lacked the zeal of his grandfather and great-grandfather, instead demonstrating a deep cynicism as regards God and the Church.
* Raimond-Berenguié II, or Raimond-Berenguié the Great
King of Aquitaine (March 7, 975 - Jan. 28, 1011)
King of Jerusalem (June 26, 986 - March 18, 1008)
Prince of Holland (March 7, 975 - April 26, 990)
Coming to the throne at age 27 and profoundly influenced in his religious views by the infamous Cadaver Synod, Raimond-Berenguié lacked the zeal of his grandfather and great-grandfather, instead demonstrating a deep cynicism as regards God and the Church.
Just four months later, his forebears' arrangement of dynastic marriages bore fruit, as Raimond-Berenguié's cousin, also named Raimond-Berenguié, inherited the Kingdom of Bohemia from his father, King Bavor. The young man found Bohemia in dire straits, depleted of manpower and facing three wars for its holdings in Croatia, and he was soon overthrown. At home, finding the nobles of Aquitaine a touch dubious about him, the king distributed liberal gifts to his vassals, then turned his eyes north to West Francia, seeking to complete the seizure of the Frisian lowlands.
As Raimond-Berenguié prepared for war, his chancellor, Ugues, brought word that he had successfully established a claim to the Duchy of Brabant, presently part of Capetian Austrasia. The king sat on this and instead declared war on King Humbert of West Francia, pressing Duke Folbert's de jure claim for Boulogne. Humbert, maddened by the Great Pox and depleted after a war with Norse raiders from Akershus, ruled an exhausted kingdom, and Aquitaine's men-at-arms struck with the Karlings at their weakest yet.
With his men at war in late 976, Raimond-Berenguié again received word of odd happenings in Rome, as - for the second time in his life - a Pope's corpse was dug up and tried. This time the body of Pope Stephen IV was raised and subjected to a posthumous exorcism at the order of the Franco-Norse pontiff, Honorius IV. Late in life, Stephen IV was said to have spoken in tongues and to have been possessed by a demon, and the dead pontiff's body was ritually exorcised, then beheaded, and the entire Lateran Palace sanctified with incense and holy water, before Stephen's corpse was burned and his head cast into the ocean. Raimond-Berenguié, deeply cynical about God and Mother Church after the first Cadaver Synod, rolled his eyes and sighed with contempt.
By Yuletide of 976, the war in Boulogne had been brought to a close, with Duke Folbert claiming the title Count of Boulogne for himself. Sensing Francia's weakness, Folbert raised his own host in an effort to depose the Antipope Urban V, ensconced by France at the church of St. Denis.
Finally, in 978, Raimond-Berenguié made his move to tear Brabant from Austrasia's hands. King Geoffroy Capet - holder of but one barony - was handed an ultimatum, and the host of Aquitaine set sail for Holland. Truthfully, a wave of consumption sweeping the Lowlands killed more Occitans than Austrasian soldiers did, and a short war left Brabant in Aquitanian hands, the duchy and lands being granted to Duke Folbert.
In 979, with the dust settling from the wars in the Lowlands, Raimond-Berenguié's queen, Ebrildi, reported that she was with child after seven years of trying. Finally, on the Third of January, 980, Ebrildi gave birth to a bright-eyed baby boy. Defying tradition, Raimond-Berenguié named the boy Adhémar. Raimond-Berenguié took little time to celebrate before moving to war with Lombardy, seeking to place an Italian, the elderly Fabrizio Galbaio, on the throne. Galbaio's son, Cangrande, was wed to Raimond-Berenguié's cousin Beatritz, and the Occitan King longed to place a member of the House de Perpenyà on the Italian throne. The newborn Italian king, Radelgar, could not readily resist, and Fabrizio was placed on the Italian throne by year's end.
In July 984, just as Raimond-Berenguié saw to the murder of a Bolghar adventurer with his eyes on Aquitaine, Pope Urban V called for Christendom to rise and heed the call to arms in a great pilgrimage to restore the church's control over Jerusalem. While he viewed the Church with cynicism, Raimond-Berenguié was right glad to take the fight to the Saracens, and he sent swift rider to the Holy See that he stood ready to march for the Levant. In a rarity, Raimond-Berenguié himself joined the host to oversee the Siege of Acre in April of 985. From there, Raimond-Berenguié split his armies, one host under Duke Lop the Bold of Aquitaine laying siege to Acre, while Bartoumieu of Manresa and Centolh of Saissac laid siege to Madjal Yaba.
Soon, a mighty enemy host descended on Mayor Centolh's force. Duke Lop quickly abandoned Acre and moved to aid the army at Jerusalem, with smaller armies under the King of Cornwall and the Count of Gwynedd joining the foray to swell the Christian host to nearly 30,000 strong. The ensuing Battle of Jerusalem raged for a month and left fully half the enemy force dead on the field, and Duke Lop stormed Rammala before pursuing the Muslim host to Arsuf, narrowly winning an inconclusive battle. As the new year turned, Duke Lop's host crushed the Saracens outside the gates of Adelon, massacring a 3600-strong army to a man, then turned towards Jerusalem once more, finally besieging the Holy City itself and taking it for Christendom on the 7th of June, 986. Occitan men-at-arms infamously drove the Muslims from the city, but hearing tell of a massacre of Muslim men and their sons by his men as they raided a mosque, Raimond-Berenguié ordered these men arrested and scourged, and the sons and widows of the dead Muslims were paid reparations.
Unable to withstand the force of Christendom, Caliph Abdul soon sent word of surrender, and Pope Urban V crowned Raimond-Berenguié King of Jerusalem later that year. While some claimed that only Jesus could truly be said to be King in the Holy Land, the cynical Raimond-Berenguié scoffed at this controversy and added the crown of Jerusalem to his personal arms, seeing it more as an investment in land than an investment in faith. Nevertheless, much of the south of the Holy Land remained lawless, under the control of Arab Muslim lords, but the north of the Holy Land lay in Occitan hands.
With a vast landscape under his control and a grumbling Levantine population unsure of the Occitan king's next move, Raimond-Berenguié undertook to distribute lordships as equitably as possible. His brother Aymeric was made Baron of Rammala, and a relative of Duke Lop, Ebles d'Amalric, was made Count of Madaba. But still more titles were granted to local people - the converso Shujah, professing belief in Christ, was made Count of Beirut, and soon more Levantine Christians and even some crypto-Muslims were soon ennobled. A kinsman of Duke Lop - Peire-Raimond d'Albon - was created Duke of Jerusalem, while Count Ghazi, a local convert, was created as lord over Galilee.
Eager to restore all of the Holy Land to Catholic hands, Raimond-Berenguié declared war on the two major landlords in the Middle East - Emir Qawurd the Just of Ascalon and Emir Shaiban the Careless, overlord of the lands beyond the Jordan. By May of 988, Occitan soldiers had returned to the Holy Land and breached the gates of Ascalon, seizing the city and its surrounds and tossing the family of Emir Qawurd into the streets. Desirous of seeing Jerusalem eventually into the hands of his loved ones, he named his brother, Baron Aymeric of Ramalla, as Duke of Ascalon and Count of Beersheb. By the summer of 989, the lands beyond the Jordan had followed, and Raimond-Berenguié declared that he would have mercy on the women and children he captured at Shoubak, in the name of God. Work began on two new castles, the Crusader castles of Kerak and Monreal. While some Muslims were permitted to remain as walis of cities such as Shoubak, Occitan lords were named as counts: Godafres, a distant descendant of Charlemagne, was made Prince-Bishop of the Negev, while the young sergeant Filip d'Aurillac was named Count of Kerak and Matfre des Baux was named Count of Monreal and Duke of Oultrejordain.
With the distant, landlocked Emir of Khorasan declaring a quixotic war for some candidate's claim to Hebron, a weary Raimond-Berenguié sighed and loaded his men onto the ships again, then took to his desk to take stock of his land. By now, constant war in the Holy Land had left Aquitaine stretched to its limits, with more land than Raimond-Berenguié could effectively administer. Wracked by flu, the king took to his bed as his commanders led the march back to the Levant to do battle with Emir Qawurd the Tormentor.
Meanwhile, in the Frankish Lowlands, Duke Folbert proved himself strong enough to stand alone as he wrenched Liege from the hands of Austrasia. Well pleased, Raimond-Berenguié set sail for Sluys, where he and a legate of Pope Urban V crowned Duke Folbert as Prince of Holland and Protector of the Low Countries, entrusting the Low Franconians with their own destiny and freeing himself of the need to administer the lands of the Low Franconians - by now beginning to be spoken of as the Dutch.
Emir Qawurd and his men arrived in the summer of 990, meeting a vastly superior host of Aquitaine in Safed. The Occitan soldiers rapidly dismantled the small host of Khorasan and drove it along the coast, capturing Emir Qawurd outside the gates of Tripoli. While sending him home in shame tempted Raimond-Berenguié, he ordered the cruel, lunatic, pox-stricken old man put to death on the spot. A Saracen relief column was promptly crushed, and Raimond-Berenguié extracted war reparations from Qawurd's son, Jabir.
In 991, Raimond-Berenguié jailed Mayor Borel of Pamiers and Bishop Rogier of Albi after the two were caught in the act of murdering one of the king's kinsmen, Rainer. Later, catching Prince-Bishop Gausbert of Lleida scheming to claim the March of Hispania, Raimond-Berenguié imprisoned him, but released him when Pope Urban V threatened the King with excommunication. Meanwhile, in a move that could only be described as baffling, the Shia Caliph of Abyssinia called for a jihad against Bulgaria, marching his host across Arabia and Anatolia on foot into the face of a superior foe. At home, tragedy struck when Queen Ebrildi, ill with smallpox, died giving birth to Raimond-Berenguié's fourth son, his father's namesake. In mourning, the king wed Ansegudis of Saint-Pol later that year.
Seeing the Muslim world wracked by war and division, Raimond-Berenguié called a crusade of his own in the spring of 994. Riding with the Knights Templar and Hospitaller, the men of Aquitaine shipped to the Holy Land, where they did war for the Sinai against the beleaguered Caliph Abdul, and for Tripoli against the independent Sulamid Emirate. Upon landing, half the army marched north to rapidly reduce the strongholds of Tripoli. A merchant prince, Raimond de Mentone, was granted the city of Gibelet and given a broad trade charter for the eastern Mediterranean. The other half of the army moved to besiege the Sinai as much of the Muslim world rallied to Abdul's banner. A large host of the Bakrids of Baghdad besieged Tiberias, but was driven off, and the Emir's heir, Aziz, imprisoned.
The southern army, meanwhile, made headway in Arish and Eilat, then moved west to confront the enemy host massing in Egypt. The arrival of the Addauids of Anatolia into the war obliged Raimond-Berenguié to ship hired mercenaries to the Holy Land to bolster his forces. These men, mostly Lombards and Germans, arrived just in time to reinforce a faltering host of Aquitaine at Eilat, and the Occitan company soon drove the enemy host into the hills, completing the subjugation of the Sinai by the dawn of 997.
The fortress of Farama was granted to Rainer's 17-year-old son, Uc de Perpenyà, though in truth Uc was nearly the only Occitan in that land, most of the region being held by Arab Catholics and non-Chalcedonian Christians willing to submit to the Church of Rome's lordship. The counties were assigned to the vassalage of Duke Aymeric of Ascalon, with the expectation that Jerusalem would one day be handed to him.
997 marked a glorious year for the House de Perpenyà, with members of the once-obscure family from Roussillon ruling three kingdoms: Aquitaine, as well as Leon (under the sadist and adulter, Jaufret the Tormentor) and Italy (with the inheritance of Francés the Bold). Still more members of the family ruled outside of these realms, as vassal dukes and earls in Alger, Achaia and Wiltshire. With Prince Aymeric ruling as Aquitaine's top duke in Jerusalem, Occitan lords sat astride much of the Mediterranean and northern Iberia as the years turned towards the new millennium. Aquitaine steamed towards the year 1000 at its apogee, far and away the most powerful kingdom in Europe or Asia, with towering figures ruling it and few enemies capable of opposing it.
As 998 dawned, the Abdulid Caliph was toppled by a revolt of Bedouin tribesmen, further shattering the Caliphate into tiny competing emirates. As the weather grew colder, Aquitaine's Jewish chancellor, Reuven of Dariyaoh, traveled to Caliph Mansur's seat in Aswan and presented him with documents asserting Aquitaine's claim to the city of Aqabah, as part of the Holy Land de jure. Troops took to the ships, not as holy warriors but as warriors in a conventional fight for land.
The war was more tedious than difficult, raging through to the new year of 1001 as a vastly superior host of Aquitaine besieged Aqabah. Finally, with control of the region uncontested, Raimond-Berenguié sent terms of surrender to Caliph Mansur and declared the land his. The city was entrusted to Girvais de Chancelade and made a vassal of the Duke of Oultrejordain.
A bid by Duke Ghazi of Galilee to forge a claim on Jerusalem led Raimond-Berenguié to order his arrest in late 1001. Ghazi defied the King and raised his levies, and Raimond-Berenguié shuttled men from Aquitaine to the Holy Land to crush the impertinent duke. Ghazi was stripped of his lands and left in the gaol, and Galilee was entrusted to Garcia de Fenolhet. More rebellions followed in 1003, as the Muslims of Tripoli revolted and had to be put down; meanwhile, Raimond-Berenguié's move to strip Duke Vicenc of Aquitaine of his lands in Auvergne saw that duke rebel against the crown, only to be defeated, stripped of his duchy title and put in chains.
In 1008, with old age creeping up on him, Raimond-Berenguié met with reservation news that Caliph Mansur was finally beginning to get control of his vassals, signaling that a jihad would be imminent. The administration of the Holy Land had proven difficult to manage from Toulouse. Thus, in March of that year, Raimond-Berenguié declared that his son, Adhémar, would be his co-ruler in Aquitaine, and his brother Aymeric the Holy, Duke of Ascalon, would bear Aquitaine's crown in Jerusalem.
With the Gothic coast beset by Viking raiders and the robber band of the Avar raider, Manas the Wise, stress began to get the better of Raimond-Berenguié in his later years, and he spent much time in his tower, chafing over matters of defense. In 1010, he made a move on West Francia, hearing of the birth of a son to the excommunicated Carolingian king, Othon. But rather than go to war, Raimond-Berenguié instead interceded on the Carolingian's behalf with Pope Martin II, affecting the lifting of Othon's excommunication. Eventually, though, stress got the better of him, and he died early in 1011, clutching at his chest as his heart gave out.
As Raimond-Berenguié prepared for war, his chancellor, Ugues, brought word that he had successfully established a claim to the Duchy of Brabant, presently part of Capetian Austrasia. The king sat on this and instead declared war on King Humbert of West Francia, pressing Duke Folbert's de jure claim for Boulogne. Humbert, maddened by the Great Pox and depleted after a war with Norse raiders from Akershus, ruled an exhausted kingdom, and Aquitaine's men-at-arms struck with the Karlings at their weakest yet.
With his men at war in late 976, Raimond-Berenguié again received word of odd happenings in Rome, as - for the second time in his life - a Pope's corpse was dug up and tried. This time the body of Pope Stephen IV was raised and subjected to a posthumous exorcism at the order of the Franco-Norse pontiff, Honorius IV. Late in life, Stephen IV was said to have spoken in tongues and to have been possessed by a demon, and the dead pontiff's body was ritually exorcised, then beheaded, and the entire Lateran Palace sanctified with incense and holy water, before Stephen's corpse was burned and his head cast into the ocean. Raimond-Berenguié, deeply cynical about God and Mother Church after the first Cadaver Synod, rolled his eyes and sighed with contempt.
By Yuletide of 976, the war in Boulogne had been brought to a close, with Duke Folbert claiming the title Count of Boulogne for himself. Sensing Francia's weakness, Folbert raised his own host in an effort to depose the Antipope Urban V, ensconced by France at the church of St. Denis.
Finally, in 978, Raimond-Berenguié made his move to tear Brabant from Austrasia's hands. King Geoffroy Capet - holder of but one barony - was handed an ultimatum, and the host of Aquitaine set sail for Holland. Truthfully, a wave of consumption sweeping the Lowlands killed more Occitans than Austrasian soldiers did, and a short war left Brabant in Aquitanian hands, the duchy and lands being granted to Duke Folbert.
In 979, with the dust settling from the wars in the Lowlands, Raimond-Berenguié's queen, Ebrildi, reported that she was with child after seven years of trying. Finally, on the Third of January, 980, Ebrildi gave birth to a bright-eyed baby boy. Defying tradition, Raimond-Berenguié named the boy Adhémar. Raimond-Berenguié took little time to celebrate before moving to war with Lombardy, seeking to place an Italian, the elderly Fabrizio Galbaio, on the throne. Galbaio's son, Cangrande, was wed to Raimond-Berenguié's cousin Beatritz, and the Occitan King longed to place a member of the House de Perpenyà on the Italian throne. The newborn Italian king, Radelgar, could not readily resist, and Fabrizio was placed on the Italian throne by year's end.
In July 984, just as Raimond-Berenguié saw to the murder of a Bolghar adventurer with his eyes on Aquitaine, Pope Urban V called for Christendom to rise and heed the call to arms in a great pilgrimage to restore the church's control over Jerusalem. While he viewed the Church with cynicism, Raimond-Berenguié was right glad to take the fight to the Saracens, and he sent swift rider to the Holy See that he stood ready to march for the Levant. In a rarity, Raimond-Berenguié himself joined the host to oversee the Siege of Acre in April of 985. From there, Raimond-Berenguié split his armies, one host under Duke Lop the Bold of Aquitaine laying siege to Acre, while Bartoumieu of Manresa and Centolh of Saissac laid siege to Madjal Yaba.
Soon, a mighty enemy host descended on Mayor Centolh's force. Duke Lop quickly abandoned Acre and moved to aid the army at Jerusalem, with smaller armies under the King of Cornwall and the Count of Gwynedd joining the foray to swell the Christian host to nearly 30,000 strong. The ensuing Battle of Jerusalem raged for a month and left fully half the enemy force dead on the field, and Duke Lop stormed Rammala before pursuing the Muslim host to Arsuf, narrowly winning an inconclusive battle. As the new year turned, Duke Lop's host crushed the Saracens outside the gates of Adelon, massacring a 3600-strong army to a man, then turned towards Jerusalem once more, finally besieging the Holy City itself and taking it for Christendom on the 7th of June, 986. Occitan men-at-arms infamously drove the Muslims from the city, but hearing tell of a massacre of Muslim men and their sons by his men as they raided a mosque, Raimond-Berenguié ordered these men arrested and scourged, and the sons and widows of the dead Muslims were paid reparations.
Unable to withstand the force of Christendom, Caliph Abdul soon sent word of surrender, and Pope Urban V crowned Raimond-Berenguié King of Jerusalem later that year. While some claimed that only Jesus could truly be said to be King in the Holy Land, the cynical Raimond-Berenguié scoffed at this controversy and added the crown of Jerusalem to his personal arms, seeing it more as an investment in land than an investment in faith. Nevertheless, much of the south of the Holy Land remained lawless, under the control of Arab Muslim lords, but the north of the Holy Land lay in Occitan hands.
With a vast landscape under his control and a grumbling Levantine population unsure of the Occitan king's next move, Raimond-Berenguié undertook to distribute lordships as equitably as possible. His brother Aymeric was made Baron of Rammala, and a relative of Duke Lop, Ebles d'Amalric, was made Count of Madaba. But still more titles were granted to local people - the converso Shujah, professing belief in Christ, was made Count of Beirut, and soon more Levantine Christians and even some crypto-Muslims were soon ennobled. A kinsman of Duke Lop - Peire-Raimond d'Albon - was created Duke of Jerusalem, while Count Ghazi, a local convert, was created as lord over Galilee.
Eager to restore all of the Holy Land to Catholic hands, Raimond-Berenguié declared war on the two major landlords in the Middle East - Emir Qawurd the Just of Ascalon and Emir Shaiban the Careless, overlord of the lands beyond the Jordan. By May of 988, Occitan soldiers had returned to the Holy Land and breached the gates of Ascalon, seizing the city and its surrounds and tossing the family of Emir Qawurd into the streets. Desirous of seeing Jerusalem eventually into the hands of his loved ones, he named his brother, Baron Aymeric of Ramalla, as Duke of Ascalon and Count of Beersheb. By the summer of 989, the lands beyond the Jordan had followed, and Raimond-Berenguié declared that he would have mercy on the women and children he captured at Shoubak, in the name of God. Work began on two new castles, the Crusader castles of Kerak and Monreal. While some Muslims were permitted to remain as walis of cities such as Shoubak, Occitan lords were named as counts: Godafres, a distant descendant of Charlemagne, was made Prince-Bishop of the Negev, while the young sergeant Filip d'Aurillac was named Count of Kerak and Matfre des Baux was named Count of Monreal and Duke of Oultrejordain.
With the distant, landlocked Emir of Khorasan declaring a quixotic war for some candidate's claim to Hebron, a weary Raimond-Berenguié sighed and loaded his men onto the ships again, then took to his desk to take stock of his land. By now, constant war in the Holy Land had left Aquitaine stretched to its limits, with more land than Raimond-Berenguié could effectively administer. Wracked by flu, the king took to his bed as his commanders led the march back to the Levant to do battle with Emir Qawurd the Tormentor.
Meanwhile, in the Frankish Lowlands, Duke Folbert proved himself strong enough to stand alone as he wrenched Liege from the hands of Austrasia. Well pleased, Raimond-Berenguié set sail for Sluys, where he and a legate of Pope Urban V crowned Duke Folbert as Prince of Holland and Protector of the Low Countries, entrusting the Low Franconians with their own destiny and freeing himself of the need to administer the lands of the Low Franconians - by now beginning to be spoken of as the Dutch.
Emir Qawurd and his men arrived in the summer of 990, meeting a vastly superior host of Aquitaine in Safed. The Occitan soldiers rapidly dismantled the small host of Khorasan and drove it along the coast, capturing Emir Qawurd outside the gates of Tripoli. While sending him home in shame tempted Raimond-Berenguié, he ordered the cruel, lunatic, pox-stricken old man put to death on the spot. A Saracen relief column was promptly crushed, and Raimond-Berenguié extracted war reparations from Qawurd's son, Jabir.
In 991, Raimond-Berenguié jailed Mayor Borel of Pamiers and Bishop Rogier of Albi after the two were caught in the act of murdering one of the king's kinsmen, Rainer. Later, catching Prince-Bishop Gausbert of Lleida scheming to claim the March of Hispania, Raimond-Berenguié imprisoned him, but released him when Pope Urban V threatened the King with excommunication. Meanwhile, in a move that could only be described as baffling, the Shia Caliph of Abyssinia called for a jihad against Bulgaria, marching his host across Arabia and Anatolia on foot into the face of a superior foe. At home, tragedy struck when Queen Ebrildi, ill with smallpox, died giving birth to Raimond-Berenguié's fourth son, his father's namesake. In mourning, the king wed Ansegudis of Saint-Pol later that year.
Seeing the Muslim world wracked by war and division, Raimond-Berenguié called a crusade of his own in the spring of 994. Riding with the Knights Templar and Hospitaller, the men of Aquitaine shipped to the Holy Land, where they did war for the Sinai against the beleaguered Caliph Abdul, and for Tripoli against the independent Sulamid Emirate. Upon landing, half the army marched north to rapidly reduce the strongholds of Tripoli. A merchant prince, Raimond de Mentone, was granted the city of Gibelet and given a broad trade charter for the eastern Mediterranean. The other half of the army moved to besiege the Sinai as much of the Muslim world rallied to Abdul's banner. A large host of the Bakrids of Baghdad besieged Tiberias, but was driven off, and the Emir's heir, Aziz, imprisoned.
The southern army, meanwhile, made headway in Arish and Eilat, then moved west to confront the enemy host massing in Egypt. The arrival of the Addauids of Anatolia into the war obliged Raimond-Berenguié to ship hired mercenaries to the Holy Land to bolster his forces. These men, mostly Lombards and Germans, arrived just in time to reinforce a faltering host of Aquitaine at Eilat, and the Occitan company soon drove the enemy host into the hills, completing the subjugation of the Sinai by the dawn of 997.
The fortress of Farama was granted to Rainer's 17-year-old son, Uc de Perpenyà, though in truth Uc was nearly the only Occitan in that land, most of the region being held by Arab Catholics and non-Chalcedonian Christians willing to submit to the Church of Rome's lordship. The counties were assigned to the vassalage of Duke Aymeric of Ascalon, with the expectation that Jerusalem would one day be handed to him.
997 marked a glorious year for the House de Perpenyà, with members of the once-obscure family from Roussillon ruling three kingdoms: Aquitaine, as well as Leon (under the sadist and adulter, Jaufret the Tormentor) and Italy (with the inheritance of Francés the Bold). Still more members of the family ruled outside of these realms, as vassal dukes and earls in Alger, Achaia and Wiltshire. With Prince Aymeric ruling as Aquitaine's top duke in Jerusalem, Occitan lords sat astride much of the Mediterranean and northern Iberia as the years turned towards the new millennium. Aquitaine steamed towards the year 1000 at its apogee, far and away the most powerful kingdom in Europe or Asia, with towering figures ruling it and few enemies capable of opposing it.
As 998 dawned, the Abdulid Caliph was toppled by a revolt of Bedouin tribesmen, further shattering the Caliphate into tiny competing emirates. As the weather grew colder, Aquitaine's Jewish chancellor, Reuven of Dariyaoh, traveled to Caliph Mansur's seat in Aswan and presented him with documents asserting Aquitaine's claim to the city of Aqabah, as part of the Holy Land de jure. Troops took to the ships, not as holy warriors but as warriors in a conventional fight for land.
The war was more tedious than difficult, raging through to the new year of 1001 as a vastly superior host of Aquitaine besieged Aqabah. Finally, with control of the region uncontested, Raimond-Berenguié sent terms of surrender to Caliph Mansur and declared the land his. The city was entrusted to Girvais de Chancelade and made a vassal of the Duke of Oultrejordain.
A bid by Duke Ghazi of Galilee to forge a claim on Jerusalem led Raimond-Berenguié to order his arrest in late 1001. Ghazi defied the King and raised his levies, and Raimond-Berenguié shuttled men from Aquitaine to the Holy Land to crush the impertinent duke. Ghazi was stripped of his lands and left in the gaol, and Galilee was entrusted to Garcia de Fenolhet. More rebellions followed in 1003, as the Muslims of Tripoli revolted and had to be put down; meanwhile, Raimond-Berenguié's move to strip Duke Vicenc of Aquitaine of his lands in Auvergne saw that duke rebel against the crown, only to be defeated, stripped of his duchy title and put in chains.
In 1008, with old age creeping up on him, Raimond-Berenguié met with reservation news that Caliph Mansur was finally beginning to get control of his vassals, signaling that a jihad would be imminent. The administration of the Holy Land had proven difficult to manage from Toulouse. Thus, in March of that year, Raimond-Berenguié declared that his son, Adhémar, would be his co-ruler in Aquitaine, and his brother Aymeric the Holy, Duke of Ascalon, would bear Aquitaine's crown in Jerusalem.
With the Gothic coast beset by Viking raiders and the robber band of the Avar raider, Manas the Wise, stress began to get the better of Raimond-Berenguié in his later years, and he spent much time in his tower, chafing over matters of defense. In 1010, he made a move on West Francia, hearing of the birth of a son to the excommunicated Carolingian king, Othon. But rather than go to war, Raimond-Berenguié instead interceded on the Carolingian's behalf with Pope Martin II, affecting the lifting of Othon's excommunication. Eventually, though, stress got the better of him, and he died early in 1011, clutching at his chest as his heart gave out.
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Admiral Matt
Gone Fishin'
I have CK2 on my steam account but haven't played in years. I'm conscious that the map only keeps scaling up, and the game tended to get slow enough back when Persia was the end of the world.
Any advice on what kind of capacity I need to get the thing running smoothly? I'm suspicious I'd have to get a new computer.
Any advice on what kind of capacity I need to get the thing running smoothly? I'm suspicious I'd have to get a new computer.
A supercomputer would chug with that game after a few centuries of gameplay. The single thread coding ensures even the most powerful machines have been layed low bring out CK2.
