Papal States going crazy

[Alerion]

Hey... In my two recent games (one as Venice and one as England) the papal states are going crazy... they are conquering a lot of stuff... in my venice game they conquered almost all of africa... which I only realized when I had to take rome after a failed assassination attempt on the pope

In my England game it's even worse... The pope owns all of Italy a good part of HRE land and is advancing deep into france...

Did you guys also encounter this? Is that a normal behaviour for them? Because in my other games I`ve never seen them conquering anything, they staid in there little province... which is as it hsould be IMO...

[Ramses II CP]

Every so often something gets under the Pope's skin and he goes off a'conquering. In fact the Papacy is one of the few factions that, once they get rolling, will tend to build a pretty good empire. I kind of like it when he goes on a tear, makes things more interesting, though obviously a lot less realistic.

[Arcana]

I've actually never seen it happen. They tend to have like a full stack and a half-stack and then just sit there twiddling their thumbs while the other catholic factions do all the donkey work. Once or twice I've known them take exception to the HRE and capture Florence from them, but then the Pope's ambitions sort of dissipated into the ether. Worse, I was rooting for him...

[Monsieur Alphonse]

In my campaigns it happens all the time. In my last campaign as Egypt the pope started to recreate the Roman Empire controlling both Rome and Constantinople. In my current campaign as Russia I had to conquer the entire north of Italy which he controlled. His current capital is Thessalonica. He is very happy to go on crusade and since Milan in this campaign is some kind of hound from hell, almost all the crusades are directed against a city controlled by Milan.

[Alerion]

Wow... I've never seen the papacy take part of a crusade though... the french are pretty keen on that... I think they joined EVERY SINGLE crusade ever called in all my M2TW games... EVER...

[Ibn-Khaldun]

The Papacy go 'crazy' usually if they manage to get another settlement. If they manage to conquer Flonrence at the beginning of the game they soon go after Milan and Venice.
In case you give them land in Levant they tend to build a pretty mighty Empire over there.
But it's only if they manage to get a province. If they don't they will move their army near Rome and that's it.