- Baudolino on the Third Crusade
When darkness fell over Constantinople they set off. It was a sizeable party, but in those days various bands of citizenry moved like lost souls from one end of the city to another, to look for a porch where they could spend the night. Baudolino had taken off his crusader garb, because, if someone were to stop him and ask him the name of his lord, he would have
difficulty replying. At their head went Pevere, Boiamondo, Grillo, and Taraburlo, with the air of four men accidentally taking the same path. But they looked around at every corner, clutching their just-sharpened knives under their clothing.
Shortly before they reached Saint Sophia a ruffian with blue eyes and long yellow mustache rushed towards the group, grabbed the hand of one of the girls, no matter how ugly and pocked she appeared, and tried to drag her off. Baudolino told himself the moment had come to give battle, and the Genoese were with him, but Niketas had a better idea. He saw a group of horsemen coming down the street and he flung himself on his knees before them, asking justice and mercy, appealing to their honor.
They were probably the Doge’s men, and they set to striking the barbarian with the flat of their swords, driving him off and restoring the girl to her family.
Beyond the Hippodrome the Genoese chose safer streets: narrow alleys, where the houses were all burned or bore obvious signs of scrupulous looting. The pilgrims, if they were still looking for something to steal, had gone elsewhere. Towards night they passed the walls of Theodosius.
There the rest of the Genoese were waiting with the mules. They bade farewell to their protectors, with many embraces and good wishes, and went off along a country road, under a springtime sun, with the moon almost full on the horizon. A light wind was blowing off the sea. They had all rested during the day, and the journey did not seem to tire even the wife of Niketas. But he was extremely tired, gasping at every jolt of his steed, and every half hour he had to ask the others to let him rest for a while.
“You ate too much, Master Niketas,” Baudolino said to him.
“Would you deny an exile the final delicacies of his homeland as it is dying?” Niketas replied. Then he looked for a boulder or a fallen tree trunk on which to sit: “But it’s my eagerness to learn the rest of your adventure. Sit here, Baudolino, feel this peace, smell the good odors of the countryside. Let us rest a little, and go on with your story.”
As later, in the three days following, they traveled by day and rested at night beneath the open sky, to avoid places inhabited by God knows whom.
It was under the stars, in a silence broken only by the rustle of boughs and by sudden sounds of nocturnal animals, that Baudolino continued his account.
At that time—and we’re in the year 1187—Saladin unleashed the last attack on Christian Jerusalem. He won. He behaved generously, allowing all those who could pay a tax to leave the city, unharmed, and he confined himself to beheading before the walls all the Knights Templar because, as all admitted, he was generous, yes, but no general worthy of the name could have spared the chosen troop of the invader enemy, and even the Templars knew that, in following their trade, they were accepting the rule that no prisoners were taken. But for all Saladin’s demonstrated magnanimity, the whole Christian world was shaken by the end of that Frankish rule overseas that had resisted for almost a hundred years. The pope appealed to all the monarchs of Europe for a third expedition of crusaders again to liberate Jerusalem, now reconquered by the infidel.
For Baudolino, his emperor’s participation in that enterprise was the occasion he had been awaiting. To descend on Palestine meant preparing to move to the East with an invincible army. Jerusalem would be retaken in a flash, and afterwards nothing would remain but to continue towards the Indias. However, it was on this occasion that he discovered how weary and uncertain Frederick felt. He had pacified Italy, but surely he feared that, leaving it, he would lose the advantages he had gained.
Or perhaps he was troubled by the idea of a new expedition towards Palestine, remembering his crime during the previous expedition, when, driven by rage, he had destroyed that Bulgarian monastery. Who knows? He hesitated. He asked himself if it was his duty, and when you start asking this question (Baudolino said to himself) it’s already a sign that there is no duty that is drawing you on.
“I was forty-five years old, Master Niketas, and I was risking the dream of my life, or my life itself, since my life had been built around that dream. And so, coldly, I decided to give my adoptive father a hope, a sign from heaven of his mission. After the fall of Jerusalem, the survivors of that ruin arrived in our Christian lands, and through the imperial court had passed seven knights of the Temple who, God knows how, had escaped the vengeance of Saladin.
They were in bad shape, but perhaps you don’t know what the Templars are like: drinkers and fornicators, and they’ll sell you their sister if you give them yours to grope—or, better still, it is said, your little brother. In short, let’s say I gave them refreshment, and everyone saw me going around the taverns with them. Hence it wasn’t hard for me one day to tell Frederick those shameless simoniacs had stolen in Jerusalem the Grasal itself.
I said that, since the Templars were broke, I gave them all the money I had, and I bought it. Frederick naturally was dumbfounded at first. But wasn’t the Grasal in the hands of Prester John, who wanted to give it to him? And weren’t we planning to go look for John precisely to receive that most holy relic as a gift? So it was, my Father, I said to him, but obviously some treacherous minister robbed it from John, and sold it to some band of Templars, who had come raiding those parts, not realizing where they were.
It wasn’t important to know the how and the when. We were now proposing to the holy and Roman emperor another and more extraordinary opportunity: he could seek out Prester John with the aim of returning the Grasal to him. Not using that incomparable relic to gain power, but to fulfill a duty, which would win him the gratitude of the Priest and eternal fame throughout all Christendom. Between seizing the Grasal and returning it, between hoarding it and returning it to where it had been stolen, between possessing it (as all dreamed) and performing the supreme sacrifice of depriving himself of it—it was obvious on which side the true blessing lay, the glory of being the one and true rex et sacerdos. Frederick would become the new Joseph of Arimathea.
“You were lying to your father.”
“I was acting for his good, and the good of the empire.”
“You didn’t ask yourself what would happen if Frederick really reached the Priest, handed him the Grasal, and the Priest widened his eyes, wondering what this bowl was that he had never seen before? Frederick would have become not the glory but the laughingstock of Christendom.” “Master Niketas, you know men better than I. Imagine: you are Prester John, a great emperor of the West kneels at your feet, and hands you such a relic, saying it is rightfully yours, and you start snickering and saying you’ve never seen that tavern bowl before? Come now! I’m not saying the Priest would have pretended to recognize it. I’m saying that, dazzled by the glory that would fall on him, its acknowledged custodian, he would have recognized it at once, believing he had always possessed it.
And so I took to Frederick, as a most precious object, the bowl of my father Gagliaudo, and I swear to you that at that moment I felt like the celebrant of a sacred rite. I handed over the gift and the memory of my carnal father to my spiritual father, and my carnal father was right: that most humble thing, with which he had communicated all his life as a sinner, was truly, spiritually the cup used by poor Christ, who was heading for death, for the redemption of all sinners. In saying the Mass, doesn’t the priest take the most common bread and the most common wine and make them become the body and blood of Our Lord?”
“But you weren’t a priest.”
“And, in fact, I didn’t say that the object was the blood of Christ, I said only that it had contained that blood. I wasn’t usurping any sacramental power. I was bearing witness.”
“False witness.”
“No. You told me that, believing a relic true, you catch its scent. We believe that we, only we, need God, but often God needs us. At that moment I believed it was necessary to help him. That cup must truly have existed, if Our Lord had used it.
If it had been
