What I Am Reading: "Baudolino" by Umberto Eco

I concluded my historical fiction spree with another of my favorite authors, Umberto Eco. He is another author that I hoard the works of, doling them out sparingly instead of glutting myself. This story is framed in 1204, as a rescued Byzantine civil servant sets down the tale of the adventurer Baudloino, former servant of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who had returned from a trip to the East to find the fabled kingdom of Prester John. However, Baudolino is an earnest fabricator of tales (and, as it turns out, of holy relics). He is not just a liar of convenience, nor is he a fanatic who believes his own spin. He is an augmenter of reality, who provides convenient fictions and plausible deniability to his Emperor and others in order for them to accomplish their goals.

This is how he came to be taken in by Frederick, when, as a child, sheltering the lost Emperor at his farm, he spins a campfire story of seeing the local legend, Saint Baudolino, in a way that portends victory for Frederick on the eve of battle. Frederick is bemused by this; he doesn't believe it himself, but uses the story to rally and inspire his army to victory in their upcoming battle. He takes Baudolino on as a patron and sends him to study and be of service. After a few years of instruction, before being sent to the rowdy streets of Paris, Baudolino is tasked by the dying Bishop Otto with keeping the Emperor interested in the idea of Prester John, by "testify[ing] falsely to what you believe true." (p.56). This will keep the Emperor seeking greatness in the East, and not just bog him down squabbling with the Italian city-states that pay him homage.

This takes a while to come to fruition, as Baudolino's involvement with the Prester John story snowballs through the years based on forged documents that are accidentally leaked, then reinforced by posturing foreign monarchs. In the mean time, Baudolino invents ways out of political jams for Frederick, who must subdue posturing subjects, especially in quarrelsome Italy, without losing face and preferably without great loss of life. Eventually, Frederick, Baudolino, and Baudolino's traveling party set out on the Third Crusade, with a plan to perhaps seek the kingdom to the east after Jerusalem is sorted out. This is not to be, however, as Frederick dies in Armenia while staying overnight in a mysterious castle. This is an important historical event, and receives a couple of chapters at the time and renewed interest at the end of the book, when the Emperor's death is revealed for more than it seemed. However, it is just one episode of many in Baudolino's life story, and one of the ones that pushes him toward the overarching goal. His party is not in favor with the Emperor's heir, and the only thing they can do from the camp in Armenia is set out in search of Prester John's kingdom, which they have no choice but to believe in in spite of themselves, with only a few counterfeit heads of John the Baptist to use as currency (as noted, relic-forging comes up a few times for economic or political benefit; “a relic is valid if it finds its proper place in a true story,” says Baudolino (p.111)).

The Kingdom of Prester John is full of strange versions of humanity, skiapods (one-footed men) and blemmyes (men with no heads, with their faces on their torso) and so on. These are straight from medieval manuscripts, inventions of travelers or simply of fantastical scholars. Baudolino is, in some ways, as unreliable a narrator as these actual manuscripts were, since he freely confesses his fabrications early in his story. However, even when he crosses into the fantastic, the line remains blurry, as he and his companions only arrive at an outpost of Prester John's kingdom, and come to suspect that the eunuch elites of that outpost have fabricated the contact with Prester John. The outpost itself, despite its pretensions, is decidedly non-glamorous. The story is full of these wheels-within-wheels blurring of fiction and reality, with the fiction of the novel by Eco based on the fiction created by medieval scholars or illustrators, presented as real by the character’s narration but rendered dubious by the novel's own framing story, and with some aspects of the tale rendered dubious in the eyes of both the narrator and the chronicler. It is all a wonderful mix-up between reader, author, narrator, and in-story chronicler.

I knew there were some cameos and references to medieval history and fiction that I was missing, but I didn't realize the extent of it until after I finished and went to research. All of Baudolino's companions are based on medieval figures, largely poets, of unconfirmed or mythical existence. My lack of a medievalist background did not serve me well here, though sometimes Baudolino would offhandedly mention having created (or destroyed) some document or item that I was sure would have elicited recognition for someone more familiar with the subject matter. As I’d expect from Eco, it is a dense text, rewarding even to me as a confirmed layman on the subject, and is appropriately humbling.