Baudolino

by Umberto Eco

  "In what sense?"

  "If you read Otto's Chronica, which is a history of the world, you see that he—how should I put it?—did not have a good opinion of the world and of us human beings. The world had perhaps begun well, but it had grown worse and worse; in other words, mundus senescit, the world grows old, we are approaching the end.... But in the very year that Otto began rewriting the Chronica, the emperor asked also that his feats be celebrated, and Otto began writing the Gesta Friderici, which he didn't then finish because he died just over a year later, and Rahewin continued the work. You can't narrate the feats of your sovereign if you're not convinced that with him on the throne a new era begins, that this, in other words, is a historia iucunda...."

  "One can write the history of one's own emperors without renouncing severity, explaining how and why they advance towards their ruin."

  "Maybe you can do that, Master Niketas, but not the good Otto; and I'm only telling you how things went. So that holy man on the one hand was rewriting the Chronica, where the world went badly, and on the other the Gesta, where the world could only become better and better. You will say he contradicted himself. If it were only that. What I suspect is that in the first version of the Chronica the world went even worse, and so as not to contradict himself too much, as he gradually went on rewriting the Chronica, Otto became more indulgent towards us humans. This is what I caused by scraping away the first version. Maybe, if that had remained, Otto wouldn't have had the courage to write the Gesta, and since it's thanks to the Gesta that in the future they will say what Frederick did and didn't do; if I hadn't scraped away the first text, in the end Frederick wouldn't have done everything we say he did."

  "You," Niketas said to himself, "are like the liar of Crete: you tell me you're a confirmed liar and insist I believe you. You want me to believe you've told lies to everybody but me. In all my years at the court of these emperors I have learned to extricate myself from the traps of masters of deceit far more sly than you.... By your own confession, you no longer know who you are, perhaps because you have told too many lies, even to yourself. And you're asking me to construct the story that eludes you. But I'm not a liar of your class. In all my life I have questioned the stories of others in order to extract the truth. Perhaps you're asking me for a story that will absolve you of having killed someone to avenge the death of your Frederick. You are building, step by step, this story of love for your emperor, so that it will then be natural to explain why it was your duty to avenge him—assuming that he was killed, and that he was killed by the man you have killed."

  Then Niketas looked outside. "The fire is reaching the Acropolis," he said.

  "I bring bad luck to cities."

  "You believe you are omnipotent. That is a sin of pride."

  "No. If anything, it's an act of mortification. All my life, no sooner did I approach a city than it was destroyed. I was born in a land sown with hamlets and a few modest castles, where I heard itinerant merchants sing the beauties of the urbis Mediolani, but what a city was, I didn't know. I had never gone even to Terdona, whose towers I could see in the distance, and Asti and Pavia I thought were at the confines of the Earthly Paradise. Afterwards, all the cities I encountered were about to be destroyed or had already been burned to the ground: Terdona, Spoleto, Crema, Milan, Lodi, Iconium, and then Pndapetzim. And the same will happen to this one. Could I be—how do you Greeks say it?—a polioclast, fated to bear the evil eye?"

  "Don't punish yourself."

  "You're right. At least once, I saved a city. My own. I saved it with a lie. Do you think that one good deed is enough to ward off the evil eye?"

  "It means there is no destiny."

  Baudolino remained silent for a moment. Then he turned and looked at what had been Constantinople. "All the same, I feel guilty. The men who are doing that are Venetians, and people of Flanders, and above all the knights of Champagne and of Blois, of Troyes, Orleans, Soissons, not to mention my own people of Monferrato. I would rather see this city destroyed by the Turks."

  "The Turks would never do that," Niketas said. "We're on excellent terms with them. It's the Christians we have to guard against. But perhaps your people are the hand of God, who has sent you for the punishment of our sins."

  "Gesta Dei per Francos," Baudolino said.

  4. Baudolino talks with the emperor and falls in love with the empress

  In the afternoon Baudolino resumed his narrative, more tersely, and Niketas decided not to interrupt him any more. He was in a hurry to see the story grow, to arrive at the point. He had not realized that Baudolino, as he was narrating, had not yet reached the point of his life, and that he was narrating precisely in order to reach it.

  Frederick had entrusted Baudolino to Bishop Otto and to his assistant, Canon Rahewin. Otto, of the great family of Babenberg, was the emperor's maternal uncle, even though he was barely ten years Frederick's senior. A very learned man, Otto had studied in Paris with the great Abélard, then he had become a Cistercian monk. At a very young age he had been raised to the dignity of bishop of Freising. It was not that he had devoted much energy to this great city, but, as Baudolino explained to Niketas, in Western Christianity, the offspring of noble families were named bishop of this or that place without having actually to go there, and it sufficed for them to enjoy the income.

  Otto was not yet fifty, but he seemed a hundred, always a bit sickly, crippled on alternate days by pains now in a hip, now in a shoulder, affected by gallstone, and a bit bleary-eyed thanks to all his reading and writing, which he did both in the sun's light and by that of a candle flame. Highly irritable, as is often the case with the gouty, the first time he spoke to Baudolino he said to him, almost snarling: "You've won over the emperor by telling him a pack of lies. Isn't that so?"

  "Master, I swear it isn't," Baudolino protested.

  Otto replied: "A liar who denies is confirming. Come with me. I'll teach you what I know."

  Which shows that, in the final analysis, Otto was a goodhearted man and had become fond of Baudolino because he found him receptive, capable of retaining in his memory everything he heard. But he realized that Baudolino proclaimed loudly not only what he had learned but also what he had invented.

  "Baudolino," he would say to him, "you are a born liar."

  "Why do you say such a thing, master?"

  "Because it's true. But you mustn't think I'm reproaching you. If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things."

  Baudolino proited from these lessons of his master's, and as for his being a liar, he also began to realize, little by little, the extent of Otto's lying, seeing how he contradicted himself passing from the Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus to the Gesta Friderici. Whereupon Baudolino decided that if he wanted to become a perfect liar, he also had to listen to the talk of others, to see how people persuaded one another in turn on this or that question. For example, on the subject of the Lombard cities he had heard various dialogues between the emperor and Otto.

  "How can they be such barbarians? There's a reason why in the past their kings wore a crown of iron!" Frederick was outraged. "Has no one ever taught them that respect is due the emperor? Baudolino, do you realize? They practice regalia!"

  "And what reglioli are they, my good father?" The others all laughed, and Otto most of all, because he still knew the Latin of ancient times, the proper language, and he knew that the regaliolus is a little bird.

  "Regalia, regalia, iura regalia, Baudolino, you blockhead!" Frederick cried. "They are the rights due to me, such as appointing magistrates, collecting levies on the public roads, on the markets, and on the navigable rivers, the right to mint money, and ... and ... and what else, Rainald?"

  "And the income from fines an
d sentences, from the appropriation of estates without legitimate heir or through confiscation for criminal activities or through having contracted an incestuous marriage, and the percentages of the earnings of mines and salt works. And fisheries, percentages of the treasures excavated from public land," continued Rainald of Dassel, who would shortly be named chancellor and thus the second person of the empire.

  "There. And these cities have appropriated all of my rights. But they lack any sense of what is just and good! What demon so clouded their minds?"

  "My dear nephew and emperor," Otto interjected, "you are thinking of Milan, of Pavia and Genoa as if they were Ulm or Eu. The cities of Germany were all born at the command of a prince, and from the beginning they have recognized themselves in the prince. But for these cities it is different. They arose while the Germanic emperors were engaged in other matters, and they have grown and taken advantage of the absence of their princes. When you speak to the inhabitants about the podestà, the governor that you would like to impose on them, they feel this potestatis insolentiam is an intolerable yoke, and they have themselves governed by consuls whom they themselves elect."

  "But don't they like to have the protection of princes and share in the dignity and glory of an empire?"

  "They like that very much, and for nothing in the world would they deprive themselves of this advantage. Otherwise they would fall prey to some other monarch, perhaps the emperor of Byzantium or perhaps the sultan of Egypt. But the prince must remain distant. You live surrounded by your nobles, so perhaps you are not aware that in their cities relations are different. They do not recognize the great vassals, lords of field and forest, because fields and forests belong to the cities—except perhaps for the lands of the marquess of Monferrato and a few others. Mind you, in the cities young men who practice the mechanical arts—who could never set foot in your court—administer, command, and are sometimes raised to the dignity of knight."

  "So the world is upside down?" the emperor cried.

  "My good father"—Baudolino held up a finger—"why, you are treating me as if I were one of your family, and yet yesterday I was sleeping on straw. What of that?"

  "It means that, if I wish, I will make you a duke, because I am the emperor and I can ennoble anyone by my decree. But it does not mean that anybody can ennoble himself on his own! Don't they understand that if the world is turned upside down, they are also hastening towards their own ruin?"

  "It seems they don't, Frederick," Otto replied. "These cities, with their way of governing themselves, are now the places through which all wealth passes. Merchants gather there from all over, and their walls are more beautiful and solid than those of many castles."

  "Whose side are you on, uncle?" the emperor shouted.

  "Yours, my imperial nephew, but for this very reason it is my duty to help you understand the strength of your enemy. If you insist on obtaining from those cities that which they don't want to give you, you will waste the rest of your life besieging them, defeating them, and seeing them rise again, more proud than before, in the space of a few months; and you will have to cross the Alps to subdue them once more, whereas your imperial destiny lies elsewhere."

  "Where would my imperial destiny lie?"

  "Frederick, I have written in my Chronica—which through some inexplicable accident has disappeared and now I must set myself to rewriting it, may God punish Canon Rahewin, who is responsible for its loss—that, some time ago, when the supreme pontiff was Eugene III, the Syrian bishop of Gabala, who visited the pope with an Armenian delegation, told Eugene how in the Extreme Orient, in lands very close to the Earthly Paradise, there is the prospering realm of a Rex Sacerdos, the Presbyter Johannes, a king certainly Christian, even though a follower of the heresy of Nestor, and whose ancestors are those Magi, also kings and priests, but depositaries of very ancient wisdom, who visited the infant Jesus."

  "And what is the connection between me, emperor of the holy and Roman empire, and this Priest John, may the Lord long keep him king and priest down there wherever the devil he may be, among his Moors?"

  "You see, my illustrious nephew, that you say 'Moors' and think as the other Christian kings do, while they exhaust themselves in the defense of Jerusalem—a most pious enterprise, I won't deny that, but let's leave it to the king of France, since in any case the Franks now command in Jerusalem. The destiny of Christianity, and of every empire that wants to be holy and Roman, lies beyond the Moors. There is a Christian realm beyond Jerusalem and the lands of the infidel. An emperor capable of joining the two reigns would reduce the infidel empire and the empire of Byzantium itself to a pair of abandoned islands, lost in the vast sea of his glory!"

  "Fantasies, dear uncle. Let's keep our feet on the ground, if you please. And let's get back to those Italian cities. Explain to me, dearest uncle, why, if their condition is so desirable, some of them become my allies against the others, instead of uniting, all together, against me."

  "Not yet, at least," Rainald prudently remarked.

  "I repeat," Otto explained, "they don't mean to deny their position as subjects of the empire. That's why they seek your help when another city oppresses them, as Milan does Lodi."

  "But if the condition of being a city is the ideal, why does each try to oppress its neighboring city, as if it wanted to engulf that territory and transform it into a realm?"

  Then Baudolino spoke up, with his wisdom as local informant. "My dear father, the question is why not only the cities but also the hamlets beyond the Alps feel the greatest pleasure in screw—ouch!" (Otto also used pinching as an educational tool.) "...I mean to say, one likes to humiliate the other. That's how it is in our parts. You may hate the foreigner, but most of all you hate your neighbor. And if the foreigner helps us harm our neighbor, then he's welcome."

  "But why?"

  "Because people are wicked, as my father always said, but the people of Asti are worse than Barbarossa."

  "And who is Barbarossa?" The emperor Frederick was furious.

  "You are, dear father; that's what they call you there, and for that matter I don't see anything bad about it, because your beard really is red, and the name suits you well. And if they wanted to say that your beard was the color of copper, would Copperbeard suit you? Barbadirame?. I would love and revere you all the same if your beard were black, but since it's red, I don't see why you should make such a fuss about being called Barbarossa. What I wanted to say, if you hadn't got angry about the beard, is that you should be calm, because, in my opinion, they'll never join all together against you. They're afraid that if they win, one city will become stronger than the others. And so they prefer you, provided you don't make them pay too much."

  "Don't believe everything Baudolino tells you." Otto was smiling. "The boy's a liar by nature."

  "No, sir," Frederick replied. "When he talks about Italy, the boy as a rule says things that are absolutely right. For example, now he teaches us that our only chance, with the Italian cities, is to divide them as much as possible. Only then you never know who's with you and who's against you!"

  "If our Baudolino is right," Rainald of Dassel said, sneering, "whether they're with you or against you doesn't depend on you, but on the city they want to harm at that moment."

  Baudolino felt a little sorry for this Frederick, so big and grand and powerful, who couldn't accept the reasoning of his subjects. And to think that he spent more time on the Italian peninsula than in his own lands. He, Baudolino said to himself, loves our people and doesn't understand why they betray him. Maybe that's why he kills them like a jealous husband.

  In the months after their return Baudolino had had few opportunities to see Frederick, who was preparing a diet at Ratisbon, then another at Worms. He had to maintain the friendship of two quite fearsome relatives, Henry the Lion, to whom he had finally given the dukedom of Bavaria, and Henry Jasomirgott, for whom he had actually invented a dukedom of Austria. Early the next spring, Otto announced to Baudolino that in June they would all be
leaving for Herbipolis, where Frederick was happily to be married. The emperor had already had a wife, from whom he had been separated a few years before, and now he was about to wed Beatrice of Burgundy, who brought him as her dowry that county, as far as Provence. With such a dowry, Otto and Rahewin thought the marriage was inspired by material interest, and in this spirit Baudolino, supplied with new clothing as the auspicious occasion demanded, was prepared to see his adopted father on the arm of a Burgundian spinster more appealing on account of the possessions of her ancestors than for any personal beauty.

  "I was jealous, I confess," Baudolino said to Niketas. "After all, I had only recently found a second father, and now he was being taken away from me, at least in part, by a stepmother."

  Here Baudolino paused, displaying some embarrassment; he ran a finger over his scar, then he revealed the terrible truth. He arrived at the wedding and discovered that Beatrice of Burgundy was a twenty-year-old maiden of extraordinary beauty—or at least so she seemed to him, who, once he had seen her, was unable to move a muscle, as he looked at her wide-eyed. Her hair was a tawny gold, the face was lovely, the mouth small and red as a ripe fruit, teeth white and neatly aligned, erect of posture, a demure gaze, clear eyes. Her smooth speech was modest, the body slender. She seemed to dominate in her dazzling grace all those surrounding her. She knew how to appear (supreme virtue in a future queen) submissive to her husband, whom she apparently feared as a master, but she was his mistress in making clear to him her own will as his wife, with such graceful manners that her every wish was promptly taken as a command. If one then needed to add something further in her praise, it was said she was versed in letters, skilled at making music, and sweet in singing it. Thus, Baudolino concluded, being called Beatrice, she was truly beatified.