“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
