Crusader Kings II - Easy Way to Get Money

You will never be poor again.

Other Crusader Kings II Guides:

Introduction

All credit goes to JD!

Here I’ll tell you a simple way how to get some money in this game, mainly it can be helpful in early game (especially if you’re playing as a tribe and/or as a Count and money is a real problem). To be able to use this method you will need two DLCs (or at least one of them):

Way Of Life
Monks and Mystics

I Need Your Clothes, Your Boots and Your Motorcycle

Our goal is to find characters who have money and take it from them. There are two ways to find characters:

First, check your courtiers – open the “Ledger” window (shortcut “,”), go to the “Your court” page and sort couriers by “Gold”.

(Yeah, unfortunately everyone is poor there).

Second, using “Characters finder” (shortcut “.”). Filter by “Join Court” and “Ruler” (we are looking for landless characters who agree to join). Next, I’d recommend sort them by “age” – old characters first (I believe there are more chances that old characters have more money).

Here you have to manually check each character in the list and see how much money they have, once you find someone who has some invite him/her to the court. If you didn’t find anyone wait a few months/years and try again (the higher your title the more characters would like to join your court).

Now you need to imprison these characters (I have to say that you can imprison them without a reason but this will incur opinion penalty). So, in order to do this you can either switch to the “Intrigue” focus and start spying on them until you get a reason to arrest (in this case you need Way Of Life DLC).

Or you can join “Demon Worshipers” society (Monks and Mystics DLC) and use the “Attempt to Abduct” ability (this ability is available for all members even with the lowest rank).

There is one cool option that you can do with your prisoners – banishment. Banishment of the courtiers means they will be banished from the realm and all their money will go to your character.

Cool, right? Several times I found characters who had 500+ and even 1500+ gold.

Conclusion

Always check the “Righteous imprisonment” notification and see who can be imprisoned and how much money they have. Courtiers is the number one target, landed characters as well as their spouses and children can only be ransomed (actually you can banish your vassals but you won’t get their money), usually it doesn’t worth to kidnap them unless you want to revoke their title (and then banish).