What's the easiest/best faction to control?

[Frederick_I_Barbarossa]

My two nominations:
England
Portugal

[anders]

scotland- crush the english opressors quickly, then advance trough europe at the push of pike, with the north sea guarding your rear. pretty much any faction with a free rear is easy to play.

[_Tristan_]

I would go for scotland - 2 advantages : situated in a map corner, thus more easily defended and lots of good quality troops from the start...

The second would be either the moors (no Pope or excomm : so no limitation on conquest) or the danes...

I don't know how you could find Sicily one of the easiest...

I have to concede that almost all factions are fairly easy (the AI problem) but Italian ones in spite of fielding low-cost/ low-upkeep units have quite difficult starting positions with few rebel settlements to sack in the beginning and warmongering neighbours to contend with...

[microbus]

What i do is play milan get all my units onto a boat and send them to rome and well kill the pope and take rome giving you lots of res, but also lots of enemies.