How to keep the Kings from fighting each other

crusader-kings-2

I'm running a nice empire with, as any self respecting Emperor would require, absolute crown authority. The wiki says:

Vassals can no longer go to war (except to rebel) at all … It also does not work for any king vassal unless they are your de jure vassal.

I have several King vassals who wage quite a lot of wars on each other, vassals, and outsiders. If I wanted to keep all of my Kings at constant peace, would I have to hold the de jure Empire title above them? E.g. Hispania for Leon, Castille, Navarra et al, Francia for France, Aquitane, Bhriotáin and Brugundy. So far, only the Holy Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire exist, so it feels very weird to have vassals beholden to crown laws under nonexistent empire titles.

Can Kingdoms ever assimilate into Empires? If this were to occur, would they finally be under my crown authority?

I noticed that I can set the Crown Authority for each of my Kingdom titles independently; I gather that my vassals have that authority as well. What would the impact be if they had a lower crown authority than mine? Their vassals would be able to declare war, yes? Would they be able to declare on just other vassals of their liege or would they be able to target my other vassals?

Best Answer

The simple way to limit vassal kings from going to war with your other vassals is to make sure that they have all of their de jure kingdom within their realm. Otherwise the AI will go about trying to achieve that by themselves. While in theory a vassal king can still try to press other sorts of claims on your other vassals, these are harder to come by. In practice the lack of any de jure claims seems to keep vassal kings from waging war within your empire.

Mind you I've never used absolute crown authority, as I prefer to leave option of declaring war on targets outside my realm open to my vassals. The law any self respecting emperor wants is imperial administration. That lets you revoke vassals from your vassals, even kings, without penalty if they're starting to get too powerful.

Kingdoms will drift into your de jure empire, just like duchies will drift into de jure kingdoms. All the counties of the the de jure kingdom need to be inside your realm, and the kingdom title needs to be either part of your of realm or not exist. It takes 100 years to complete. In practice it'll probably take longer because rebellions will temporarily remove counties from your realm, causing the timer to start going backwards.

I'm pretty sure your vassal kings aren't beholden to crown laws of non-existent empire titles. They should have their own crown laws if they're not your de jure vassal.