You can also marry people for political gain. Go try starting on your own faction if you don't like not doing anything. I got tired of not going on long campaigns where nothing happened, and if something did, I would not get anything for it. After a while, capturing a lot of castles and not getting any reward gets boring. One time i captured four castles and one city in a row and didn't get a single one of them. I didn't have any land either.