Requires christian faction, DER DEE DEE!

Can be done in as little as three turns.

You need:
Requires either you having a cardinal on college of cardinals or an open slot in the college availible.

One army, decent enough to take the target province, but you need an army with a general (no captains) so you can join a crusade

4 Priests (if your faction starts with a cardinal only make 3)

5 Assassins (if you already have a decent skilled assassin, use him)

Target country to crusade


Method:
1. Send all assassins to Rome.

2. Declare crusade on a far away, 0% catholic, weak in revel force province.

3. Add army to crusade and send it off.

4. Send all priests to target province.

5. By the time your crusader army gets to its destination (usually well before then, if open spot in college of cardinals then you'll get it) your priests will start ranking up as they spread the good word. Once you have atleast 1 priest in the college then procede with step 6.

6. Start killing the pope! Usually doesn't work first time, have all assassins constantly attack him till he dies, you might get declared war on or excomunicated but once he's dead you're fine. After pope dead go with step 7.

7. Take the city you crusaded against, send all avalible priests to the province, make as many priests as you can afford.

By elections you should have atleast 1 Cardinal as preferati and 4 cardinals in the college total. Just keep making priests and sending them to 0% catholic places and you'll keep getting your priests into the college (for some reason once you got 2 in there the rest come real easy, I've managed to make entire college Venetian except for Holy Roman Empire, for whatever reason they have a gauranteed spot).

With the pope always on your side you should be able to manipulate anything to your favor or at worst use diplomat to ask papacy faction to attack w/e faction is attacking you, if the pope came from your faction they should be very helpfull to you, just throw in militray access and map information to 10,000 florins and you can get the pope to attack almost anybody.

Hope this helps~