It is a peculiar kind of novel where the difficult ideas are more interesting than the swashbuckling, or the sex, or the death, or the gruesome objects. After the Emperor's death, Baudolino and his friends set off on a long journey, encompassing 15 years, to find the Kingdom of Prester John.

Sent to Paris to learn "the art of saying well that which may or may not be true" Baudolino fell in with a band of good fellows and fell in love with his stepmother. It turns, like the Christian religion, on questions of paternity and the presence of the divine spirit in matter such as the blood and wine of the Eucharist.This part involves an element of secret history – the book asserts that Emperor Frederick had not drowned in a river, as history records, but died mysteriously at night while hosted at the castle of a sinister Armenian noble. The earlier parts of the story follow the general historical and geographical outlines of 12th-century Europe, with special emphasis on the Emperor Frederick's futile efforts to subdue the increasingly independent and assertive city states of Northern Italy.

this is a book for the intellect (Eco doesn't spare you from thinking), the reader (it's trendously well written), and the funny bone (Baudolinos escapades are as funny as anything in Flashman). You can't help but wonder if we can really be sure that the entire portions of not just religious but secular history weren't just manufactured out of thin air. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.After a brief foray into Baudolino's youthful attempts at autobiography, the novel opens in Constantinople in 1204, at the time of the Fourth Crusade. Conflicts between the monster tribes are grounded in religious differences, and here the novel draws attention to the often spurious ideological distinctions that provoke mutual animosity. It carries its formidable learning lightly, using it both as clues and as red herrings, as set-pieces and as rich background, interesting all sorts of readers quite incidentally in medieval theology and Aristotle. There's just one other thing that marks Eco out as being not only master of this genre but also of others.