At this point nothing remained but to describe his palace and his magic mirror, and on this score the Poet had already said everything some evenings earlier. But he remembered it, whispering into Abdul’s ear, so that Baudolino would hear no more talk of topazes, which clearly were required in this case.
“I believe that a future reader,” Rabbi Solomon said, “will wonder why such a powerful king had himself called only Priest.”
“True, and this allows us to arrive at the conclusion,” Baudolino said. “Abdul, write”:
Why, O most beloved Frederick, our sublimity does not grant us an appellative more worthy than that of Presbyter is a question that does honor to your wisdom. To be sure, at our court we have ministers on whom are conferred duties and names far more worthy, especially where the ecclesiastical hierarchy is concerned. Our dispenser is primate and king, king and archbishop our wine steward, king and archimandrite our blacksmith, king and abbot our chief cook. So then our own highness, unwilling to be designated with these same titles, or to receive the same orders in which our court abounds, in humility determined to be called by a less important name, of a lower rank. For the moment suffice it for you to know that our territory extends in one direction a distance of four months’ march, whereas in the other direction no one knows how far it reaches. If you could number the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea, then you could measure our possessions and our power.
It was almost daybreak when our friends finished the letter. Those who had taken the honey were still in a state of smiling stupefaction; those who had drunk only wine were tipsy; the Poet, who had again tasted both substances, could hardly stand. They walked, singing, through the narrow streets and the squares, touching that parchment with reverence, now convinced that it had just arrived from the kingdom of Prester John.
“Did you send it at once to Rainald?” Niketas asked.
“No. After the Poet left, we reread it for months and polished it, scraping and rewriting many times. Every now and then someone would suggest a little addition.”
“But Rainald was expecting the letter, I imagine….”
“The fact is that meantime Frederick had removed Rainald from the position of chancellor of the empire, which he gave then to Christian of Buch. To be sure, Rainald, as archbishop of Cologne, was also archchancellor of Italy, and he remained very powerful, so much so that it was still he who organized the canonization of Charlemagne; but that replacement, at least in my view, meant that Frederick had begun to feel Rainald was too aggressive. So how could we present to the emperor a letter that, after all, had been desired by Rainald? I was forgetting: in the same year as the canonization,
Beatrice had a second son, and so the emperor had other things on his mind, also because, according to rumors I heard, the first child was always sickly. So, what with one thing and another, more than a year went by.”
“Rainald didn’t insist?”
“At first he also had other things on his mind. Then he died. While Frederick was in Rome to expel Alexander III and put his antipope on the throne, a pestilence broke out, and the plague takes the rich and the poor alike. So Rainald died. I was shaken, even though I had never really loved him. He was arrogant and rancorous, but he had been a bold man and had fought to the end for his master. Rest his soul. But at this point, without him, did the letter still make any sense? He was the only one sufficiently
clever to know how to profit by it, having it circulate among the chancelleries of all the Christian world.”
Baudolino paused. “Besides, there was the question of my city.” “What city? You were born in a swamp.”
“That’s true. I’m going too fast. We still have to build the city.” “At last you’re telling me about a city that’s not destroyed!”
“Yes,” Baudolino said, “it was the first and only time in my life that I would see a city’s birth, and not its death.”
- Baudolino sees the birth of a new city
Ten years had gone by since Baudolino came to Paris. He had read everything that could be read, had learned Greek from a Byzantine prostitute, had written poems and amorous letters that would be attributed to others, had practically constructed a kingdom that now no one knew better than he and his friends, but he had not completed his studies.
He consoled himself with the thought that studying in Paris had in itself been a great feat, considering that he had been born among cows. Then he recalled that in all likelihood students would be penniless youths like him, and not lords’ sons, who had to learn to make war and not to read and write…. In short, he didn’t feel entirely satisfied.
One day, Baudolino realized that in a month or so he would be twenty-six, for he had left home at thirteen, and it was exactly thirteen years that he had been away. He sensed something that we would call homesickness for his native land, only he, who had never experienced it, did not know what it was.
So he thought he was feeling a desire to see his adoptive father again, and he decided to join him in Basel, where he had stopped as he was once more returning to Italy.
Baudolino hadn’t seen Frederick since the birth of the first son.
While he was writing and rewriting the Priest’s letter, the emperor had done all sorts of things, slipping like an eel from north to south, eating and sleeping on horseback like his barbarian forefathers, and his palace was simply the place where he happened to be at that moment. In those years he had returned to Italy another two times. The second time, along the way, he had suffered an insult at Susa, where the citizens rebelled against him, obliging him to flee in secret and in disguise, because they were holding Beatrice hostage. Then the Susani let her go, having done her no harm, but he had cut a sorry figure, and had sworn an oath against Susa. Nor did he rest when he came back across the Alps, because he had to make the German princes
see reason.
When Baudolino finally saw the emperor, he found him with a very grave expression. Baudolino understood that, on the one hand, Frederick was more and more concerned about the health of his older son—also named Frederick—and, on the other, about the situation in Lombardy. “Agreed,” he admitted, “and I say this only to you: my governors and my viceroys and my tax collectors were not only demanding what was my due, but seven times that; for every hearth they exacted every year three solidi of old coinage, and twenty-four old dinaria for every mill that
operated on navigable waters; from the fishermen they took away a third of the catch; and if someone died without children the inheritance was confiscated. I should have paid attention to the complaints that reached me, I know, but I had other things on my mind….
And now it seems that some months ago the Lombard communes formed a League, an anti-imperial League, you understand. And what was their first decision? To rebuild the walls of Milan!”
The Italian cities were turbulent and disloyal, yes; but a League was the formation of another res publica. Naturally, that League could not endure, given the way one city in Italy hated the next; it was not even to be thought, and yet it was still a vulnus for the empire’s honor.
Who was joining the League? According to rumor, in an abbey not far from Milan there had been a gathering of delegates from Cremona, Mantua, Bergamo, and perhaps also Piacenza and Parma, but that was unsure. The rumors did not stop there, however; they spoke of Venice, Verona, Padua, Vicenza, Treviso, Ferrara, and Bologna. “Bologna! Can you believe that?” Frederick cried, pacing up and down in front of Baudolino. “You remember, don’t you? Thanks to me, their damned professors could make all the money they wanted with those double-damned students of theirs, without accounting to me or to the pope, and now they’re joining up with that league? Could anything be more shameless? And Pavia! That’s all we need!”
“And Lodi,” Baudolino interjected, to say something outrageous.
“Lodi? Lodi!” Barbarossa yelled, his face red as his beard, as if he were about to have a stroke. “But according to the news I’m receiving, Lodi has already taken part in the meetings. I gave my heart’s blood to protect them, that flock of sheep; without me the Milanese would have leveled them to the ground every new season, and now they’re hand in glove with their own murderers and plotting against their benefactor!”
“But, dear Father,” Baudolino asked, “why do you say ‘it seems’ and ‘according to rumor’? Don’t you receive reliable news?”
“Do you people who study in Paris lose all sense of how things proceed in this world? If there’s a league, there’s a conspiracy; if there’s aconspiracy, those who used to be on your side have turned traitor, and they tell you the exact opposite of what they are doing down there, so the last to know what they’re doing will be the emperor, like husbands who have an unfaithful wife that everyone in the town knows about except them!”
He could hardly have chosen a worse example, because at that
