Baudolino · Forged letter
The Letter of Prester John
Baudolino of Alessandria, among others
A letter from a fabulous Christian king beyond the Muslims, full of marvels and political convenience — which Baudolino says he helped to write, and which, in our world, really did circulate in the twelfth century.
The Plan is a forgery that a few occultists believe. The Letter of Prester John is a forgery that a continent believed, and Eco has the nerve to introduce the intern who wrote it.
Baudolino lies the way other people breathe. At Barbarossa’s court the needed ally is a Christian king in the East; Baudolino, who can invent in any grammar, supplies him. Then he has to go and look, because a liar who never checks is merely a clerk. The second Poetics was a lost book Eco restored in a library and then burned. The Letter is a found book Eco restored to a young man from Alessandria and then sent on the road. Both are arguments about whether a document has to have been true to have been important.
The rating follows Venus, not Fantastic Beasts. You can read the Latin letter tonight, in a scholarly edition. You cannot read Baudolino’s draft, because Baudolino is the claim. A real object, a fictional author, a continent that did not ask for a source. This catalogue was built for that triangle.
On the readability rating. Quoted, of the historical letter, which is not quite the one in the novel. Of Baudolino’s version — a gift for languages, a night of composition, a kingdom that keeps receding. The clerks’ harvest, again.
In-world history
The real Letter of Prester John appeared around 1165 and was copied all over Europe: a priest-king in the Indies, Amazons, the Fountain of Youth, an offer of alliance. In Eco's novel the liar Baudolino, adopted by Barbarossa, has a gift for languages and for making the needed document exist. He and his friends compose wonders. The wonders go into the world. Baudolino then spends the rest of the book walking toward the kingdom he invented, which is the only honest thing a forger can do.
Why it matters
Eco's other lost Aristotle kills its readers. This letter makes a continent. It is a forgery that history adopted, which is the Plan succeeding by accident, centuries earlier.
Appearances
- Baudolino (2000) — Umberto Eco Baudolino, at Frederick Barbarossa's court and after, claims a hand in the letter that told Europe of a Christian priest-king in the East
Editions in our world
- The Letter of Prester John (Latin, c. 1165, and its many copies) A real medieval text of uncertain authorship. Eco's Baudolino claims it. History does not confirm him. Adjacent, like Farmer's Venus: a genuine object wearing a story about who wrote it.
Connected volumes
- Related to The Plan · Foucault's Pendulum
- Related to The Second Book of the Poetics · The Name of the Rose
- Related to Pierre Menard's Quixote · The Fictions of Borges
Catalogue record
- Category
- Forged letter
- World
- Baudolino
- Imagined by
- Umberto Eco
- Language
- Latin
- First appearance
- Baudolino (Bompiani, 2000)
- Readability
- Quoted
Sources
- Umberto Eco, Baudolino (Bompiani, 2000). English translation by William Weaver (Secker & Warburg / Harcourt, 2002).
- The Latin Letter of Prester John, circulating from c. 1165; a genuine medieval document of disputed origin.
Added by house · last checked 2026-09-06