Building a Legacy, Part V: The End of Leon (1093-1098)

Author: Elipticon
Published: 2019-10-29, edited: 2019-10-31

Part of the campaign:

Building a Legacy

Previous part:

Game: Crusader Kings II

Building a Legacy, Part IV: The Useless War (1082-1093)

Images: 29, author: Elipticon, published: 2019-10-12, edited: 2019-10-24

Hello, and welcome to my AAR! I'm going to be doing a normal narration instead of being historical this time, because this part is a mini-part. The main purpose of it is to segway to the next phase of this AAR.

To explain why this is happening, I feel like Alfonso's arc ended back in Part II with Garcia's death. I'm not very good at warfare, so essentially the only fun thing I could do was marry off people and manage internal affairs. I had to come up with a better idea.
One of the ideas that I came up with was taking over Ireland. They don't call it newbie island for nothing and while I've never played it I've always wanted to give it a shot.

I ended up getting a claim to the county shown, but due to other reasons it never got used.
Trade.
This was the reason I mentioned earlier for why I didn't use my claim. The Pope decided to declare a crusade, for Egypt, strangely. Crusades are always fun to do, so I jumped in.
However I realized that it probably would be a good idea to have a failsafe incase my Irish ambitions go wrong. Instead of giving the tiles to myself, I give them to my beneficiary.
Obviously Holy Orders are always good, and pus these ones actually do the reconquista for me, so I founded them.
Crusade declared.
Ferdinando dies. I knew about the attack and decided to do nothing mostly because I didn't like him. (his stats are fine, but compared to Alfonso they're nothing) This wouldn't have been important until I realized that the Aquitainian alliance that would've given me a bunch of France was gone now.
Martin dies several years later. And you may be asking, "why didn't you take any screenshots during this time?" and the reason why is because I own a mac. As far as I know, F11 doesn't work, so I have to do Command+Shift+3 to take screenshots. Sometimes I do Control+Shift+3 by accident, and this was one of them.

Crusade progress is going surprisingly well, and I was currently in first place at that point in time. The other important thing was that there was a rebellion going on in Italy that I may have forgotten about until now, that would oust Alfonso if he were to lose. Now that only 3 of the 5 bothers are alive, the titles won't be so divided, but there will still be 3 kingdoms and a god awful Italy.
And then the crusade ends. Yeah, I went through the entire crusade in 4 screenshots. I forgot to take most of them.

One of the screenshots I forgot to take was the one directly following this one. I'm not sure how well known this is, but after your beneficiary inherits a title you're allowed to play as them. And that's exactly what I did.
King Erramun I, a bright man hailing from the land of Navarra. While he was of the Basque branch of the dynasty, he supported Alfonso during his war to establish Urraca's son to the throne. Alfonso rewarded him with the entire country of Egypt.

Why I did this:
1: Crusader states are very fun to play as because almost everyone in your area wants to kill you, but you're powerful enough to be able to fight them back.

2: All of my vassal are of random cultures. The way cultures work in CK2 means that this will probably stay that way and lead to constant revolt.

3: I was losing the revolt badly. Alfonso's entire empire is going to fragment any second now.
4: PRIMOGENITURE. It is insanely difficult to get primogeniture as Alfonso because I had to get approval of the council, who were mostly Italians that didn't like Alfonso. Egypt starts out with Primogeniture, so unless there's a revolt all the hassle of killing off my kids is over.
5: Bloodlines. Erramun got a bloodline for winning the crusade and it has some nice bonuses. The combat skill props up most of the character from being terrible soldiers, which means that most of the kings will be generals. Prestige and opinion bonuses are nice too.

Join us next time, as we play through the rule of Erramun I.