Baudolino

by Umberto Eco

  It was August when, one morning, Christian of Buch summoned Baudolino and his friends and asked them to come with him to the emperor. Arriving in Frederick's presence, Christian handed him, with a dramatic gesture, a parchment heavy with seals: "Here is the letter of Prester John," he said, "as it has reached me, confidentially, from the court of Byzantium."

  "The letter?" Frederick exclaimed. "Why, we haven't yet sent it."

  "In fact, this is not ours: it's another letter. It's not addressed to you, but to the basileus Manuel. For the rest, it's the same as ours."

  "So this Prester John first offers an alliance to me and then he offers it to the Romei?" Frederick was enraged.

  Baudolino was dumbfounded, because the Priest's letter, as he well knew, existed in a single draft, and he had written it. If the Priest existed, he could also have written another letter, but surely not this one. He asked permission to examine the document, and after glancing at it in haste, he said: "No, it's not exactly the same. There are some little variants. If you will allow me, Father, I'd like to study it more closely."

  He withdrew with his friends, and together they read and reread the letter several times. First of all, it, too, was in Latin. Curious, Rabbi Solomon observed, because the Priest is sending it to the Greek basileus. In fact, it began:

  The Priest Johannes, by the grace of God and power of Our Lord Jesus Christ, king of kings, greets Manuel, governor of the Romei, wishing him health and perpetual enjoyment of divine benediction.

  "A second oddity," Baudolino said, "he calls Manuel governor of the Romei, and not basileus. So it surely wasn't written by a Greek in the imperial train. It was written by someone who doesn't recognize Manuel's title."

  "Therefore," the Poet concluded, "by the real Prester John, who considers himself the dominus dominantium."

  "Let's proceed," Baudolino said, "and I'll show you some words and phrases that weren't in our letter."

  Our majesty has learned that you held in high esteem our Excellency and that you had received word of our greatness. We have also learned from a secretary of ours that you desired to send us some things pleasing and interesting, for our delight. Being human, we gladly accept the gift, and through our apocrisiary, we are sending some token, desirous of knowing whether, like us, you follow the true faith and in every way be lieve in Our Lord Jesus Christ. For while we are well aware of our mortality, your Greeklings believe that you are a god, even if we well know that you are mortal and subject to human corruption. In the breadth of our munificence, if you need something that may procure pleasure for you, inform us, either by a word to our apocrisiary or by a testimony of your affection.

  "Here the oddities are too numerous," Rabbi Solomon said. "On the one hand he treats the basileus and his Greeklings with condescension and contempt approaching insult, on the other, for 'secretary' he uses the term apocrisiarius, which I believe is Greek."

  "Its precise meaning is ambassador," Baudolino said, "but listen to this: where we said that at the Priest's table sit the metropolitan of Samarkand and the archpriest of Susa, here it's written that there are the protopapas Samargantinum and the archiprotopapas de Susis. And, further, among the wonders of the kingdom is mentioned an herb called assidios, which drives out evil spirits. Again, three Greek terms."

  "So," the Poet said, "the letter is written by a Greek, but one who uses Greek very badly. I don't understand."

  Abdul meanwhile had picked up the parchment. "There's something else: where we mentioned the pepper harvest, there are added details. And here it says that in John's kingdom there are few horses. And here where we merely named salamanders, it says they are a species of worm, which wrap themselves in a kind of film like the worms that produce silk, and the film is then washed by the palace women to make royal cloths and dress which are washed only in a violent fire."

  "What? What?" Baudolino asked, alarmed.

  "And finally," Abdul went on, "in the list of creatures that inhabit the kingdom, among the horned men, the fauns and satyrs, the pygmies, the cynocephali, there also appear methagallinarii, cametheterni, and thinsiretae—all creatures we didn't name."

  "By the Virgin Mother of God!" Baudolino exclaimed. "That worm story was told me by Zosimos! And it was Zosimos who also told me that, according to Cosmas Indicopleustes, in India horses don't exist! And it was Zosimos who told me of methagallinarii and those other beasts! Son of a whore, pot of excrement, liar, thief, hypocrite, trimmer and counterfeiter, adulterer, glutton, coward, voluptuary, sodomite, usurer, simoniac, necromancer, sower of discord, cheat!"

  "Why, what did he do to you?"

  "Haven't you realized that yet? The evening that I showed him the letter, he got me drunk and made a copy of it! Then he went back to that shit of a basileus of his, told him that Frederick was about to reveal himself as friend and heir of Prester John, and they wrote another letter addressed to Manuel, sending it off before ours! That's why he appears so haughty towards the basileus, to ward off suspicions that the letter might have been produced in his chancellery! That's why it contains so many Greek terms, to show that this is the Latin translation of an original written by John in Greek. But it's in Latin because it's meant to convince not Manuel but the chancelleries of the Latin kings and the pope!"

  "There's another detail that escaped us," Kyot said. "You remember the story of the Grasal, which the Priest was to send to the emperor? We wanted to remain reticent, speaking only of a veram arcam.... Did you say anything about this to Zosimos?"

  "No," Baudolino said. "I kept quiet about that."

  "Here, your Zosimos has written yerarcam. The Priest is sending the basileus a yerarcam."

  "And what's that?" the Poet wondered.

  "Zosimos doesn't know that himself," Baudolino said. "Look at our original letter. At this point Abdul's writing isn't very legible. Zosimos didn't understand what it was, he assumed it was some strange and mysterious gift, which only we knew about, and so that word is explained. Oh, the wretch! All my fault: I trusted him. How shameful! What can I say to the emperor?"

  It wasn't the first time they told lies. They explained to Christian and to Frederick the reasons why the letter had obviously been written by someone in Manuel's chancellery, precisely to prevent Frederick from circulating his, but they added that probably there was a traitor in the chancellery of the Holy Roman Empire, who had sent a copy of their letter to Constantinople. Frederick vowed that if the man was found he would have everything protruding from his body torn off.

  Then Frederick asked if they shouldn't worry about some initiative from Manuel. What if the letter had been written to justify an expedition to the Indias? Christian wisely pointed out that just two years earlier Manuel had moved against the Seleucid sultan of Iconium, in Phrygia, and had suffered a dramatic defeat at Myriocephalum. Enough to keep him away from the Indias for the rest of his life. Indeed, when you thought about it, that letter was a specific if slightly puerile way to regain a bit of prestige just when he had lost a great deal.

  Still, did it make sense, at this point, to circulate the letter to Frederick? Wasn't it perhaps necessary to alter it, so that nobody would believe it had been copied from the one sent to Manuel?

  "Were you aware of this story, Master Niketas?" Baudolino asked.

  Niketas smiled. "In those days I was not yet thirty, and I was collecting taxes in Paphlagonia. If I had been counsellor to the basileus, I would have advised him not to recur to such childish machinations. But Manuel lent an ear to too many courtiers, to those who shared his bed, cuniculari, and the eunuch attendants of his chambers, even to servants, and often he succumbed to the influence of some visionary monks."

  "The thought of that worm gnawed at me. But also the fact that Pope Alexander was a worm worse than Zosimos, and worse than the salamanders was discovered in September, when the imperial chancellery received a document that probably had been communicated also to the other Christian kings and to the Greek emperor. It was the copy of a letter that Alexander III
had written to Prester John!"

  Surely Alexander had received a copy of the letter to Manuel, perhaps he was aware of the old mission of Hugo of Jabala, perhaps he feared that Frederick would draw some advantage from the news of the existence of the king and priest, and here Alexander was the first, not to receive an appeal, but to send one directly, for his letter said he had immediately dispatched an envoy of his to confer with the Priest.

  Alexander bishop servant of the servants of God, to the most beloved Johannes, son in Christ, illustrious and magnificent sovereign of the Indias, wishes him health and sends his apostolic blessing.

  After which the pope recalled that only one apostolic see (namely, Rome) had received from Peter the mandate to be caput et magistra of all believers. He said that the pope had been told of the faith and the piety of John by his personal physician Magister Philip, and that this wise man, circumspect and prudent, had heard from trustworthy people that John wished finally to convert to the true faith, Roman and Catholic. The pope regretted that for the moment he could not send him dignitaries of high rank, also because they were ignorant of linguas barbaras et ignotas, but he was sending Philip, a discreet and most cautious man, to educate John in the true faith. As soon as Philip reached him, John should send the pope a letter of his intentions and—Alexander advised him—the less he indulged in boasting about his power and wealth, the better it would be for him, if he wished to be received as a humble son of the Holy Roman Apostolic Church.

  Baudolino was scandalized by the idea that such shameless counterfeiters could exist in the world. Frederick shouted, venomously: "Son of the devil! Nobody has ever written to him, and out of spite he is the first to reply! And he is careful to refrain from calling him Johannes Presbyter, denying him all priestly dignity..."

  "He knows that John is a Nestorian," Baudolino added, "and he proposes, in so many words, that John renounce his heresy and make an act of submission to him...."

  "It is surely a letter of supreme arrogance," the chancellor Christian remarked. "He calls him son, doesn't send him even a mere bishop, but only his personal physician. He treats him like a child to be disciplined."

  "This Philip must be stopped," Frederick then said. "Christian, send messengers, assassins, whatever you like, to overtake him along the way, strangle him, tear out his tongue, drown him in a stream! He must not arrive there! Prester John belongs to me!"

  "Rest assured, dear Father," Baudolino said. "In my opinion, this Philip has never set out and it may be that he doesn't even exist. First, Alexander knows very well, if you ask me, that the letter to Manuel is bogus. Second, he has no idea where this Johannes is. Third, he wrote the letter precisely to say that Johannes belongs to him rather than to you, and further he is inviting both you and Manuel to forget the matter of the priest king. Fourth, even if Philip existed and were traveling to the Priest and even if he arrived there truly, just think for a moment of what would happen if he returned empty-handed because Prester John wasn't converted. For Alexander it would be like receiving a handful of dung in the face. He can't take such a risk."

  In any case, it was by now too late to make the letter to Frederick public, and Baudolino felt dispossessed. He had begun dreaming of the Priest's kingdom after the death of Otto, and since then almost twenty years had passed.... Twenty years gone for nothing.

  Then he picked himself up: no, the Priest's letter fades into nothingness, or becomes lost in a host of other letters; at this point anyone who so wishes can invent an amorous correspondence with the Priest, we live in a world of certified liars, but this doesn't mean that we have to give up seeking his kingdom. After all, Cosmas's map still exists. It would suffice to find Zosimos again, tear it away from him, and travel towards the unknown.

  But where had Zosimos ended up? Even if we were to learn that he was living, covered with prebends, in the imperial palace of his basileus, how to go and unmask him there, amid the entire Byzantine army? Baudolino began questioning travelers, envoys, merchants, seeking some news of that scoundrel monk. At the same time he never stopped reminding Frederick of the project: "Dear Father," he would say, "now it makes even more sense than before, because in the past you could think that the kingdom was only a fancy of mine, now you know that the basileus of the Greeks believes in it and so does the pope of the Romans, and in Paris they told me that if our mind is able to conceive of a thing that is greater than anything, surely that thing exists. I am on the trail of someone who can give me information about the correct route. Authorize me to spend some money." He succeeded in gaining enough gold to corrupt all the Greeklings who passed through Venice, he had been put in touch with reliable people in Constantinople, and he was awaiting news. When he received it, he would have only to induce Frederick to make a decision.

  "More years of waiting, Master Niketas, and meanwhile your Manuel also died. Even if I had not yet visited your country, I knew enough about it to think that, with a new basileus, all the old advisers would be done away with. I prayed to the Blessed Virgin and all the saints that Zosimos had not been killed: even blinded, he would still suit me, he had only to give me the map so I could read it. And at the same time I felt the years flowing from me like blood."

  Niketas urged Baudolino not to allow himself to be disheartened now by his former disappointment. He ordered his cook and servant to outdo themselves, and he wanted their last meal prepared under the sun of Constantinople to remind him of all the sweetness of his sea and his land. And so he wanted lobsters and porgies on the table, boiled prawns, fried crabs, lentils with oysters and clams, sea dates, accompanied by a puree of beans and rice with honey, girt with a crown of fish roe, and all served with Cretan wine. But this was only the first course. Afterwards came a stew that wafted a delicious aroma, and in the pan were steaming four hearts of cabbage, hard and white as snow, a carp and about twenty little mackerel, fillets of salt fish, fourteen eggs, a bit of Wallachian sheep cheese, all bathed in a good quart of oil, sprinkled with pepper, and flavored with twelve heads of garlic. But with that second dish he asked for a wine of Ganos.

  18. Baudolino and Colandrina

  From the courtyard of the Genoese came the laments of Niketas's daughters, who were reluctant to have their faces smeared with dirt, accustomed as they were to the vermilion of their cosmetics. "Calm down," Grillo said to them, "beauty alone doesn't make a woman." And he explained that it wasn't even certain that these marks of ringworm and pox they were applying to their faces would suffice to disgust a lusty pilgrim—those men who were satisfying themselves on anyone they found, young or old, healthy or sick, Greeks or Saracens or Jews, because in these matters religion doesn't count. To arouse disgust, he added, they should be covered with bumps, like a grater. Niketas's wife lovingly collaborated in uglifying her daughters, adding a sore on the forehead or some chicken skin on the nose, to make it seem half eaten away.

  Baudolino looked sadly at that sweet family group, and said abruptly: "And so, as I was casting about, not knowing what to do, I also took a wife."

  He told the story of his marriage in a less merry tone, as if it were a painful memory.

  "At that time I was moving back and forth between the court and Alessandria. Frederick still couldn't swallow the fact of that city's existence, and I was trying to patch things up between my fellow-citizens and the emperor. The situation was more favorable than in the past. Alexander III was dead, and Alessandria had lost its protector. The emperor was gradually coming to terms with the Italian cities, and Alessandria could no longer represent itself as the bulwark of the League. Genoa had by now come over to the side of the empire, and Alessandria had everything to gain by going with the Genoese, and nothing to gain by remaining the only city hostile to Frederick. A solution had to be found that would be honorable for all. So, while I was spending my days talking with my fellow-citizens, then returning to court to sound out the emperor's mood, I became aware of Colandrina. She was the daughter of Guasco, and she had grown up more or less before my eyes, tho
ugh I hadn't realized she had become a woman. She was very sweet, and she moved with a somewhat awkward grace. After the story of the siege, my father and I were considered the saviors of the city, and she looked at me as if I were Saint George. When I spoke with Guasco, she would crouch near me, her eyes shining, as she drank in my words. I could have been her father, because she was barely fifteen and I was thirty-eight. I don't know if I had fallen in love with her, but I liked seeing her around me, and I began telling incredible stories to the others so that she would hear me. Guasco, too, had become aware of this. It's true that he was a miles, and therefore something bigger than a ministerial like me (a peasant's son into the bargain), but, as I told you, I was the city's pet, I wore a sword on my hip, I lived at court.... It would not have been a bad match, and it was Guasco himself who said to me: Why don't you marry Colandrina? She's become a burden here, she drops the pans, and when you're away she spends all her time at the window looking out to see if you're coming. It was a fine wedding, in the church of San Pietro, the cathedral we had given to the pope, rest his soul, though the new one didn't even know it existed. It was a strange marriage, because after the first night I had to go off and join Frederick, and so it went for a good year, with a wife I saw once in a blue moon, and it touched my heart to see her joy every time I came back."