Quote Originally Posted by tarbanrael
I do not understand what the leaderless crusader army has to do with the fact the Pope does not like you? Take the intended target for the crusade and the Pope will love you dearly for at least a few turns, until you start fighting your fellow catholics again.
As was suggested earlier, pump up priests and send them to the south side of the med. You will get cardinals promoted (providing they have the minimum pity requirement) whenever other nations ones croak!

He said that Sicily beat him to Jerusalem. I've also used the tactic of assassinating other factions cardinals to get mine in. I always max out the number of priests I can build.

I recently played a game as Scotland in which I pretty much spent the whole game with one or two points of favor with the pope, with the remaining time spent excommunicated. I did, however, have churches in all of my towns and and kept pumping out the priests. Eventually, despite being at war with everyone, I managed to get more than half of the College of Cardinals. I assassinated the Pope and voted in my guy on the Preferati, and bam, perfect papal relations.