Regrading Papal States naval recruitment, I had same problem. I conquered Naples right away and wanted to get some trade fleets going but couldn't even recruit a trade ship to start either. Swiss updated his AUM to include recruitability, so then I started over, built my trade port, and with AUM 1.2, voila, I had merchant ship.
THen however, I conquered sicily, psyched up about getting a battle fleet going.
Can't recruit any military ships now either. So seeing as how I originally couldn't even get merchant men out of trade ports until Swiss incorporated an unlock in to AUM, I don't know if it has so much to do with an Admiral or it it's just locked out somehow at the moment. . .
. . .typicaly in a game I don't even get offers to recruit admirals and/or generals until I'm building up armies or navies, so unless you've got naval ships churning out, I dont' know that an Admiral would even ever appear to recruit?
But more specifically for the Balkan Mod to Husser, just about to load it up and give it a shot! Excited! Hope it's gravy! With the Balkan_loc file though, is that going to conflict with the AUM UPC file? Thought I'd read somewhere that only one loc type file can run at a time in your data dir? Could be wrong.