- Baudolino upbraids the emperor and seduces the empress
Baudolino, among his not very rigorous studies and his fantasies on the garden of Eden, had now spent four winters in Paris. He was eager to see Frederick again and, even more, Beatrice, who in his giddy spirit had now lost every earthly feature and had become an inhabitant of Paradise, like Abdul’s distant princess.
One day Rainald asked the Poet to provide an ode to the emperor. The Poet, desperate, tried to gain time by saying to his master that he was awaiting proper inspiration, then sent off to Baudolino a request for help. Baudolino wrote an excellent poem, Salve mundi domine, in which Frederick was set above all other kings, and which said that his yoke was most sweet. But unwilling to entrust it to a messenger, he decided to return to Italy, where meanwhile many things had happened, which he had difficulty summing up for Niketas.
“Rainald had devoted his life to creating an image of the emperor as lord of the world, prince of peace, source of all law and subject to none, at the same time rex et sacerdos, like Melchizedek, and therefore he could not avoid conflict with the pope. Now, at the time of the siege of Crema, Hadrian, the pope who had crowned Frederick in Rome, died, and the
majority of the cardinals elected Cardinal Bandinelli as Alexander III. For Rainald this was a calamity, because with Bandinelli it was cats and dogs, and the new pope would not yield on the question of papal supremacy.
I don’t know what Rainald schemed, but he managed to ensure that some cardinals and people of the senate elected a different pope, Victor IV, whom he and Frederick could maneuver as they wished. Naturally Alexander III immediately excommunicated both Frederick and Victor, and it did not suffice to say that Alexander was not the true pope and thus his excommunication was worthless, because on the one hand the kings of France and England were inclined to recognize him, and on the other hand for the Italian cities it was an unexpected boon to find a pope who said that the emperor was a schismatic and hence no one owed him obedience.
Further, news arrived that Alexander was plotting with your basileus Manuel, seeking support from an empire greater than Frederick’s. If Rainald wanted Frederick to be the sole heir of the Roman empire, he had to find the visible proof of a lineage. That’s why he had also set the Poet to work.”
Niketas had some trouble following Baudolino’s story, year by year. Not only did it seem to him that his narrator was a bit confused about what had happened before and what had happened after, but he also found that Frederick’s exploits were repeated, always the same, and he could no longer understand when the Milanese had taken up arms again, when they had again threatened Lodi, or when the emperor had again come down into Italy.
“If this were a chronicle,” he said to himself, “it would suffice to take any page at random and you would find there the same deeds. It’s like one of those dreams where the same story keeps recurring, and you long to wake up.”
In any case it seemed to Niketas that for two years now the Milanese had created trouble for Frederick with spiteful acts and skirmishes, and the following year the emperor, with the support of Novara, Asti, Vercelli, the marquess of Monferrato, the Marquess Malaspina, the count of Biandrate, with Como, Lodi, Bergamo, Cremona, Pavia, and some others, had again laid siege to Milan.
One fine spring morning Baudolino, now twenty, bearing his Salve mundi domine for the Poet, and his correspondence with Beatrice, which he would not leave in Paris at the mercy of thieves, arrived at the walls of that city.
“I hope that Frederick behaved better in Milan than at Crema,” Niketas said.
“Even worse, according to what I heard on arriving. He had had the eyes gouged out of six prisoners from Melzo and Roncate, whereas with one Milanese he had torn out a single eye, so that the man could lead the others back to Milan, but in compensation he had cut off that prisoner’s nose. And when he captured men trying to deliver provisions to Milan, he had their hands cut off.”
“So you see? He also gouged out eyes.”
“But with common people, not with lords, the way your rulers do. And they were his enemies, not his relatives!”
“Are you justifying him?”
“Now I am. Not then. Then I was outraged. I didn’t want even to meet him. But I had to go and pay him homage; I couldn’t avoid it.”
The emperor, on seeing him after such a long time, was about to embrace him with great joy, but Baudolino was unable to control himself. He drew back, wept, said the emperor was wicked, that he couldn’t claim to be the source of justice if he then acted unjustly, that he was ashamed of being his son.
If anyone else had said such things to him, Frederick would have ordered not only his eyes gouged and his nose cut off, but also his ears severed. Instead, he was impressed by Baudolino’s ire; and he, the emperor, tried to justify himself. “It’s rebellion, rebellion against the law, Baudolino, and you were the first to tell me that I am the law. I cannot pardon, I cannot be good. It is my duty to be merciless. You think I like it?”
“Yes, you like it, my father. Did you have to kill all those people two years ago at Crema and mutilate these others in Milan, not in battle, but in cold blood, for a question of pride, a vengeance, an affront?”
“Ah, you follow my actions as if you were Rahewin! Then let me tell you it was not a question of pride: it was an example. It’s the only way to subdue these disobedient sons. Do you think that Caesar and Augustus were more clement? It’s war, Baudolino; do you know what that is, you who act the great scholar? Do you, in Paris, realize that when you return here I will want you at court among my ministers, and perhaps I will even make you a knight? And do you think you will ride with the holy Roman emperor and not soil your hands? Does blood revolt you?
Then tell me so and I’ll have you made a monk. Then you’ll have to be chaste, mind you, though I’ve been told stories about you in Paris that make it hard for me to see you as a religious. Where did you get that scar?
I’m amazed that you have it on your face and not on your ass!”
“Your spies may have told you stories about me in Paris, but I, with no need of spies, have heard on all sides a fine story about you at Adrianople. Better my stories with Parisian husbands than yours with the Byzantine monks.”
Frederick stiffened, and turned pale. He knew very well what Baudolino meant (the youth had heard it from Otto). When Frederick was still duke of Swabia, he had taken up the cross and participated in the second expedition to go to the aid of the Christian reign in Jerusalem. And as the Christian army was advancing, with great difficulty, near Adrianople, one of his noblemen, who had become separated from the expedition, was attacked and killed, perhaps by local bandits. There was already great tension between Latins and Byzantines, and Frederick took the incident as an affront. As at Crema, his wrath became uncontrollable; he attacked a nearby monastery and slaughtered all the monks.
The episode had remained a blot on Frederick’s name; everyone pretended to forget it, and even Otto, in his Gesta Friderici, remained silent about it, mentioning instead immediately afterwards how the young duke escaped a violent flood not far from Constantinople a sign that heaven had not revoked its protection. Frederick’s pallor turned to a flush, he seized a bronze candlestick and flung himself on Baudolino as if to kill him. He barely restrained himself, lowering the weapon when he had already seized the youth by his coat, and said to him through clenched teeth: “By all the devils of Hell, never repeat what you have said.” Before leaving the tent, he turned for an instant: “Go and pay homage to the empress, then back to
your milksop clerics in Paris.”
“I’ll show you if I’m a milksop, I’ll show you what I can do,” Baudolino muttered, leaving the field. He did not know what he could do, yet he felt hatred towards his adoptive father and wanted to harm him.
Still furious, he reached Beatrice’s quarters. He dutifully kissed the hem of her dress, then her hand. She was surprised by the scar, and asked anxious questions. Nonchalantly, Baudolino answered that there had been a brawl with some highway thieves. Such things happen when you travel the world. Beatrice looked at him with admiration, and it must be said that this twenty-year-old, with his leonine face made even more virile by the scar, was by now what you would call a fine figure of a knight.
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