How to change the bishop

[GeileSockeAltF4]

Hey, i've got a vassal with a high ed value, but i can't make him my bishop since my main character is christian. is there any other way to choose which npc becomes bishop?

[jpcerutti]

As Roman Catholic? You bishop will always be chosen for you. You can make people monks, and they will occasionally be made bishops, but that's pure RNG. You can murder your bishop, and get a new one, but the new one is chosen for you.

If you want to appoint the bishop you have to either start with a religion that lets you do that OR become a heretic and start a version of Christianity that has bishops appointed by the ruler - and Roman Catholics (including the Pope) will be most unhappy about that.

[CrUsHeR]

Indeed this is because of the clerical appointment doctrine: Spiritual, For Life

Spiritual means that the clergy automatically gives you a realm priest. It takes a random suitable NPC from the pool, or if such isn't available (like after game start) it generates a random one.
For Life means the position can never be revoked anyhow by anyone.

In the game, it means you can only run murder plots against your realm priest, until you get an at least decent one.


Realm Priests are unlanded courtiers, means they cannot use a Lifestyle or get any other benefits of Count+ rank landed rulers to improve their skills. So if you see a great Catholic realm priest with like 14 skill, and a decent Muslim priest has 27, it is because of the ruler status.

For that reason, it is useful to know that landed theocratic vassals are always your next candidate as realm priest. Some realms like the HRE or France always have at least one such prince-bishop, because some of their counties have a temple as primary holding.


Sometimes it also is possible to create new theocracies. If a county changes ownership, you may see the local temples being held by random bishops. They should be removed and replaced by your realm priest as lessee by the next monthly tick, but as long as they own the temple you can give them the local county which turns their domain into a permanent theocratic title.

So what you can do here, is to revoke the theocratic title from the bishop, replace him with a new one of your choice. If your current bishop is unlanded, have him murdered and the landed bishop becomes your realm priest.

This one will however be replaced by a new pool character upon his death, so this is only temporary.

It is also bad because the old bishop will run off with all the money he earned in office. Which can be quite a lot, because your realm priest also earns 25% of all income from the realm priests of your vassals.

Additionally, theocracies can snowball pretty bad during the early game eras because their sub-realms are never split from partition succession.