Lowering zeal

[Hosakawa Tito]

How does one lower zeal in your provinces? Playing as the Danes I've been getting robbed of troops by the Germans and Spanish when they go on Crusade, and since the Danes can't "pay them back in kind" by going on Crusade too, I was wondering how to make my provinces less Crusade friendly. I tried leaving my own Inquisitors in my provinces to burn some of the populace and lower the zeal, but it doesn't seem to be very effective. The zeal does go down, from 90% to 70%, but that isn't good enough. Any ideas?

[Lehesu]

Perhaps religion? Maybe if you allowed more of the populace to become muslim or orthodox, perhaps the zeal would go down. Also, maybe a governor with low piety?

[MacGregor]

A sure fire way would be to put inquistors in your provinces. Zeal goes up at first, but eventually your inquisitor will murder a few 1000 people and zeal will get cut in 1/2.

[The Last Emperor]

Yep, inquisitiors can devastate the zeal of a provience once the killing starts. I got some of my lands' zeal dropping by more than 50% after 2-3 inquisition on each provience. btw is it bad to have low zeal for ur land other than keeping ur soldiers from joining the crusade??

[MacGregor]

I'm not 100% sure about this, but I've noticed if you have very high zeal from the people and a pretty pious ruler they will have more loyalty toward him. I think that's the only advantage if your not into crusading.