Baudolino

Baudolino is a quick-witted peasant boy adopted by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and he has a gift that shapes his entire life: anything he invents, people come to believe. Over decades he forges holy relics, helps draft a fictitious letter from the mythical Christian king Prester John, and joins a quest to find that king's impossible eastern realm. Framed as the story Baudolino tells a historian during the violent sack of Constantinople in 1204, the novel mixes a coming-of-age adventure, a murder that needs solving, and a constant interrogation of where history ends and storytelling begins. Eco fills the journey with the theology, fabricated documents, and scholarly games that animate his best work.