On another occasion they were again drinking together, and Zosimos was singing the praises of Constantinople.
Baudolino was embarrassed, because he could tell him only about the back streets of Paris, full of the excrement people flung from the windows, or about the sullen waters of the Tanaro, which could hardly compare with the gilded sea of the Propontis.
Nor could he tell him of the mirabilia urbis Mediolani, because Frederick had ordered all of them destroyed. He didn’t know how to silence his companion.
So, to amaze him, he showed him the letter of Prester John, as if to say that somewhere there was an empire that made Zosimos’s look like a barren heath.
Zosimos had barely read the first line when he asked, suspiciously: “Presbyter Johannes? Who is he?”
“You don’t know?”
“Happy is he who has attained that ignorance beyond which it is not licit to proceed.”
“You may proceed. Read on!”
He read on, with eyes that became more and more fiery, then he put down the parchment and said, in a detached tone: “Ah yes, Prester John. In my monastery I read many accounts by those who had visited his kingdom.”
“But before reading this, you didn’t even know who he was.”
“The cranes form letters in their flight without knowing the art of writing. This letter tells of a Priest named John and it lies, but it speaks of a real kingdom, which in the accounts I have read is that of the Lord of the Indias.”
Baudolino was ready to bet that this rogue was guessing, but Zosimos didn’t give him time to doubt sufficiently.
“The Lord asks three things of the man who is baptized: true faith of his soul, sincerity of his tongue, and continence of his body. This letter of yours cannot have been written by the Lord of the Indias because it contains too many errors. For example, it names many extraordinary creatures of those parts, but says nothing of—let me think—nothing, for example, of the methagallinarii, of the thinsiretae, and of the cametheterni.”
“And what are they?”
“What are they? Why the first thing that happens to anyone who arrives in the region of Prester John is that he encounters a thinsireta and if he isn’t prepared to confront it … scrunch … he’s devoured in one mouthful. Eh, those are places when you can’t just go as if you were going to Jerusalem, where at most you find a camel or two, a crocodile, a pair of elephants, and such. Furthermore, the letter seems suspicious to me because it’s very odd it should be addressed to your emperor rather than to our basileus, since the kingdom of this John is closer to the empire of Byzantium than to that of the Latins.”
“You speak as if you knew where it is.”
“I don’t know exactly where it is, but I’d know how to go there, because he who knows the destination knows also the way to it.”
“Then why have none of your Romei ever gone?”
“Who told you no one ever tried to go there? I could say that if the basileus Manuel ventured into the lands of the sultan of Iconium, it was precisely to open the way towards the realm of the Lord of the Indias.” “You could say it, but you haven’t.”
“Because our glorious army was defeated in those very lands, at Myriocephalum, two years ago. And now, before our basileus can mount a new expedition, it will take some time. But if I had great funds at my disposal, and a band of well-armed men capable of facing a thousand difficulties, with an idea of which direction to take, I would have only to set out.
Then, along the way, you inquire, you follow the advice of the natives… There would be many signs, and once you were on the right road you would begin to see trees that flourish only in those lands and to come upon animals that live only down there, like the methagallinarii, in fact.”
“Three cheers for the methagallinarii,” Baudolino said, raising his glass. Zosimos invited him to join in a toast to the kingdom of Prester John. Then he challenged him to drink the health of Manuel, and Baudolino agreed provided Zosimos drink the health of Frederick. Then they drank to the pope, to Venice, to the two courtesans they had met a few evenings before, and in the end Baudolino collapsed first, asleep, with his head on the table, while he could still hear Zosimos’s laborious muttering: “This is the monk’s life: never act with curiosity, never walk with the unjust, never snatch with your hands….”
The next morning Baudolino said, his tongue still thick, “Zosimos, you’re a rascal. You haven’t the slightest idea where your Lord of the Indias is. You want to set out on instinct, and when somebody tells you he saw a methagallinarius over there, you go off in that direction and in no time you come to a palace all of precious stones, you see some character and you say good morning, Father John, how are you? You can tell this sort of thing to your basileus, not to me.”
“But I happen to have a good map,” Zosimos said, opening his eyes. Baudolino objected that, even with a good map, everything would still remain vague and hard to decide, because everyone knows that maps are
not precise, especially for places where, at most, Alexander the Great has been, and no one else after him. And he made a rough sketch of the map drawn by Abdul.
Zosimos burst out laughing. Of course, if Baudolino followed the most perverse and heretical idea that the earth is a sphere, he couldn’t even begin the journey.
“Either you trust the Holy Scriptures, or else you’re a pagan who still thinks the way they thought before Alexander—who, for that matter, was incapable of leaving us any map. The Scriptures say that not only the earth but the whole universe is made in the form of a tabernacle, or, rather, that Moses built his tabernacle as a faithful copy of the universe, from the earth to the firmament.”
“But the ancient philosophers…”
“The ancient philosophers, not yet enlightened by the word of the Lord, invented the Antipodes, while in the Acts of the Apostles it says that God from one man devised our humankind to inhabit the entire face of the earth, its face not the other side, which doesn’t exist. And Luke’s Gospel says that the Lord gave the apostles the power to walk on serpents and scorpions, and to walk means to walk above something, not below.
Anyway, if the earth were a sphere and suspended in the vacuum, it would have neither an above nor a below, and so there would be no sense, no direction in the walking. Who thought the heavens were a sphere? The Chaldean sinners from the top of the tower of Babel, insofar as they were able to erect it, misled by the feeling of terror that the looming sky inspired in them! What Pythagoras or what Aristotle has been able to announce the resurrection of the dead?
And would ignoramuses of that stripe have understood the shape of the world? Would this world shaped like a sphere have served to predict the rising or setting of the sun, or the day on which Easter falls, whereas most humble people, who have studied neither philosophy nor astronomy, know very well when the sun sets and when it rises, according to the seasons, and in different countries they calculate Easter in the same way, without deceiving themselves? Is it necessary to know a geometry other than the one a good carpenter knows, or an astronomy different from what a peasant observes when he sows and when he reaps?
And besides, what ancient philosophers are you talking to me about? Do you Latins know Xenophanes of Colophon, who, while asserting that the world was infinite, denied that it was spherical?
The ignoramus can say that, considering the universe like a tabernacle, you can’t explain eclipses or equinoxes. Well, in the empire of us Romans, centuries ago there lived a great sage, Cosmas Indicopleustes, who traveled to the very confines of the world, and in his Christian Topography demonstrated in irrefutable fashion that the earth truly is in the form of a tabernacle, and that only thus can we explain the most obscure phenomena. Could you say that the most Christian of kings— John, I mean—would not follow the most Christian of topographies, which is not only that of Cosmas, but also that of the Holy Scriptures?”
“What I say is that my Prester John knows nothing of the topography of your Cosmas.”
“You told me yourself that the Priest is a Nestorian. Now the Nestorians had a dramatic argument with other heretics, the Monophysites. The Monophysites held that the earth was made like a sphere, the Nestorians like a tabernacle. Cosmas was also known to be a Nestorian, or in any case a follower of Nestor’s teacher, Theodore of Mopsuestia, who all his life fought against the Monophysite heresy of John Philoponus of Alexandria, who followed pagan philosophers like Aristotle. Cosmas a Nestorian, Prester John a Nestorian: both cannot but believe firmly in the earth as a tabernacle.”
“Just a moment. Both your Cosmas and my Priest are Nestorians: no argument there. But since, as far as I know, the Nestorians were wrong about Jesus and his mother, they could also be wrong about the shape of the universe, couldn’t they?”
“This is where my finest reasoning comes into play! I want to demonstrate to you that—if you want to find Prester John—you must in any case stick with Cosmas and not the
