Behold! The Roman Empire is reborn!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 


This is that Rum Sultanate game I had been talking about earlier in the thread. It's finally reached the point where I can consider it finished and stop worrying about ending 30 plots per minute from my endless list of subjects.

All in all, I guess this shows how much fun I had with Sword of Islam. The map itself is pretty interesting - I can answer any questions you have about it but for now I'll post the most interesting things.

-I can field roughly 600 thousand troops, and 25k just from my demesne. When a decadence uprising came along late-game, it nearly broke the game!
-I am also the (Titular) Sultan of Georgia and Bulgaria. I could form Croatia, Serbia, Sicily, Syria, and Egypt, but they haven't de jure converted yet.
-I killed off every single member of the Seljuk family except for my immediate family, including the whole Persian line. Even now, the only lands held by Seljuks are the Sultan's royal demesne.
-England has been the subject of quite a few Jihads, and keeps going back and forth between Muslim and Christian powers. It went from English to Egyptian (almost fully Shia converted) to Danish and now it's Mauretanian.
-At one point France was the seat of the last vestiges of Egyptian power (the Fatimids were overthrown by the Italian Reggio Sultanate, and that's what they were called. Now France has taken it back.
-The Mongols were so afraid of me they never even dared to declare war on me. The results are amusing; they never got very far. They basically took all the Cumans' and Khivans' land and called it a day. The Ilkhanate converted and is friendly; the Golden Horde is basically nonexistant.
-The Russian Empire formed on its own. All that ugly extra territory above Crimea and Alania (which I intended to take) that I have up there is the result of my Beylerbeys declaring war on their own for pieces of territory. Each of them is basically as powerful as a king in his own right.
-I Holy War'd the Pope for Rome so I could really call myself the Empire reborn. He launched a Crusade to take it back from his holding in Ireland, and I beat the crap out of all of Europe in response. I have also renamed Constantinople to Istanbul and Rome to Rum, and I hold them both in my personal demesne.
-The Seljuks have married into all the ruling dynasties of Europe, and as a result most of the monarchs are now dark-skinned. In contrast, my Sultans tended to be light-skinned because I married European brides. Just a funny culture-reversal.