«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.
- 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 and 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,
