The Holy Land is Ours! All Christendom hails us as the greatest empire since Charlemagne!
The last push to secure the borders of the kingdom started auspiciously, with a coordinated attack on the last strongholds of the Milanese. The very crusader stronghold we gave to them in the Baltic we persuaded them to give back, using not the strong words they used with the verbal backing of the pope, but with ultima ratio regum.
Our forces took London in a surprise attack, so swift their king was caught inside and killed. The Pope reconciled with the new King, but this did not prevent the Danes from conquering all of England (and from conquering Wales from the sea.) But their King retreated to his Crusader state in the Mediterranean and directed the defense from there, as their forces did not melt away, and the Pope finally told me, too late, to stop attacking his newfound Christian ally.
The English then counterattacked York, and what seemed like another easy Danish victory against superior forces they had been used to as of late was transformed into a humiliating defeat when the Danish reinforcements decided to not enter and help with the defense of the city, but to merely walk around the walls of the city, taunting the doomed inhabitants before walking away.
But the York army did the best they could with their cannon, which drove off two English assaults on the town center nearly by themselves with well-placed shots, a fair tradeoff for one of their misplaced shots killing my own General.
Alas, poetic justice was not served, as immediately after York fell and the remnants of the English attacked the nearly traitorous Danish “reinforcements,” the attackers were dealt a harsh blow such that very few were able to retreat back into the city walls.
The Spanish seemed to suffer from leadership divisions, as their crusading army passed all the way into Italy without molesting my holdings, whereas another army they sent into Languedoc afterward, despite the Pope’s truce, besieged my city. King Ingeborg himself besieged the besiegers, but did not attack them for love of the Pope. The Spanish never did get the guts to attack, but this charity was not enough to prevent the Pope from excommunicating them, despite their observance of the Crusade.
The plan for the New Model Army was nearly scrapped when the Byzantines invaded: my informants told me they were bringing lots and lots of artillery, and I did not have nearly enough War Clerics to deal with them, not to mention regular troops, so the desperate defenders were forced to hire all the available mercenaries, including the hated Condittieri, and successfully defended our Croatian holdings. But leaving Croatia open to the assault was a tradeoff Ingeborg was coldly able to make, calculating that even if it were lost, we would be able to, in the meantime, take most of the Byzantines southern Balkan holdings on our way to linking up our forces with the valiant defenders in the Middle East. At the time we heard the news about Jerusalem we were about to sweep up the rest of Byzantine defense of the Balkans, and if our assault had not played out in the Levant, certainly Constantinople herself would have fallen within years.
The defense against the Mongols seemed to augur auspicious results, as their 3 full stacks were set up against my 3 full stacks of frontline troops and artillery, with some of my best generals versus their captains. My spies figured they must have all been going back home for a funeral yet again, and that was a big laugh until one of my generals died, too. But we would have certainly been able to hold off the Horde for several turns, if not win outright.
In between joining the Crusade and arriving at Jerusalem, it had changed hands from the Egyptians to our allies the Turks. But the Crusaders refused to stop until Jerusalem was in Christian hands and attacked anyway. There were only 3 defenders inside the walls, with a large portion outside I figured would stay and defend and which we would probably been able to defeat in open battle. There was also nearly a full stack of Turkish troops in Jordan, and my only reinforcements were about 8 weak units along with a bombard that was lagging behind.
I figured the full stack of Turks would attack the stragglers, leaving the main Crusader for free to attack the city. I thought the Crusade was at an end when instead, the Turks outside the walls of Jerusalem went behind my back and scattered the laggards halfway up the Levant. I then thought that for certain, the Jordanian troops would attack my main force, but they remained quiescent, resulting in an anticlimactic capture of Jerusalem.
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