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The International Prester John Project: How A Global Legend Was Created Across Six Centuries

Prince Henry the Navigator

Infante Dom Henrique of Portugal, Duke of Viseu, more commonly known as Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) was a (if not the) key figure of Portuguese sea exploration in the so-called Age of Discovery. He is most famous for forming a loose coterie of mapmakers and navigators focused on organizing the systematic exploration of the parts of the world unexplored by Europeans.

The ascetic and allegedly celibate Henry, the son of King John I and the English-born Queen Philippa, established a center for geography and cartography at Cape Sagres.

Henry persuaded his father to conquer the North African, Muslim-controlled port city of Cueta in 1415. This event, described as an "African Crusade" helped inspire a longstanding interest in the continent for Henry. Much of his subsequent adult life was dedicated to discovery and trade along the African coast and a fervent desire to locate the legendary kingdom of Prester John.

As detailed in Azuzara's contemporary account of Henry's exploits in Guinea in the 1440s, Henry's exploration of Africa was influenced in large part by the specter of finding Prester John. Beazley (p. 18-19), referring to Azurara's account, recalls the following:

He rejoiced at news of fresh discoveries in 1441 which seemed to bring him nearer 'to the Indies and to the land of Prester John.' Since the early fourteenth century, the tradition which at first referred only to a Tartar chieftain... is gradually transferred to the Negush (sic) of Abyssinia, and it is probably this potentate, however vaguely understood, whom Dom Henrique seeks under the name of 'Preste João.' And, failing the Prester, he catches eagerly at any tale of a Christian prince in Guinea. Thus in 1446 he sends an expedition to Cape Verde, having heard that the king of that land was a Christian, inviting this potentate, 'if he truly held the law of Christ,' to aid in the war against the Moors, in which 'the King of Portugal and the Infant were continually toiling.'

Henry was also the younger brother of Prince Pedro, whose imagined exploits were recorded in a Spanish chapbook by Gómez de Santisteban.

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Path Four : 1461-1520 AD Prester John and the Project of European Colonialism

While Age of Discovery figures such as Henry the Navigator, the Christopher Columbus, and Duarte Lopes allude to John’s kingdom as a guarantor of Eastern riches. A related history of John’s kingdom in Ethiopia/Abyssinia held Western attention through the European exploration of Africa. However, in this era the accounts of Prester John are more varied than of any other era. Here Prester John serves both as historical and literary figure, as both magnificent ruler and overblown myth.

In 1482, Francisco Suriano, in his Iter, mentions arriving at the court of Prester John, a primitive place in which ten Italians were currently living, and paints a picture of mud huts and simple churches; Vasco da Gama’s Roteiro mentions the desire to make contact with Prester John; in 1499, Italian poet Guiliano Dati, composes a pair of poems on on Prester John (“Treatise on the Supreme Prester John, Pope and Emperor of India” and “Ethiopia and Second Song of India”); in 1500, a letter from “Johannes Africanus” materializes, detailing how Prester John, once mighty and powerful, is now a humble steward and laborer (guilty of pride).

In Orlando Furioso, Ariosto features an Ethiopian priest-king called Senapo who rules over an immensely wealthy kingdom and controls the flow of the Nile River—the very river that dashed crusader hopes during the Fifth Crusade. Although Ariosto’s is a highly satirical text, his inclusion of the legend shows how, even in the sixteenth century, writers were still attempting to create a plausible backstory to unite the imaginative interest in the legend with a history from which he may have emerged. John retains his historical place independent of the romance landscape he also inhabits well into the eighteenth century.
Frau Mauro Map Il mappamondo di fra Mauro (1459)

Commissioned by Portugese king Afonso V for his uncle Henry the Navigator, and created by a Venetian merchant-soldier turned hermetic monk, Fra Mauro's mappamundi represented a crowning achievement in late-medieval cartography.

As related by Brooks (p. 185), Mauro consulted Portuguese maps of travels of the Atlantic coast as one source for his world map. Brooks describes the map as a "circular planisphere drawn on parchment that has been set by curators in a wooden frame" which measured "about six feet in diameter" (p. 186).

Frau Mauro identifies Prester John's kingdom as an immense sub-Saharan African territory, with the land of "Abassia" at its center. Brooks notes that "Abassia is depicted in the map with large castles and palaces that exceed those of any other African potentate in opulence, size, and quantity." (pp. 186-7). Mauro notes that Prester John's territory "is more extensive to the south of the sources of the Nile than to the north" (Brooks, p. 190). Brooks notes that Mauro even offered a defense of his African cartography on the map, asserting that the catography of the antiquarian geographers was outdated.

In an inscription, Frau Mauro details this land as possessing qualites of the terrestrial paradise (qtd in Brooks, p. 187):
In the woods of this Abassia there is such a great quantity of honey that they do not bother to collect it. When in the winter the great rains wash these trees, that honey flows in some nearby lakes, and, thanks to the action of the sun, that water becomes like a wine, and the people of the place drink it in place of wine.
Speaking of the ruler of this land, Mauro relates
"Prester John has more than 120 kingdoms under his dominion, in which there are more that 60 different languages" (10-I6, trans. Brooks)

"Above the kingdom of Abbassia there is a very savage and idolotrous people who are separated from Abbassia by a river and by mountains, at the passes of which the kings of Abbassia have built great fortresses so that these peoples cannot pass and do harm to their country. These men are very strong and of great stature and they pay tribute to Prester John, King of Abassia, and certain thousands of these men serve him to his needs" (10-A38, trans. Brooks)

The original copy made for King Afonso has not survived.

A high-resolution version of the map is viewable couresy of the Museo Galileo.

This page references:

"Prince Henry of Portugal and the African Crusade of the Fifteenth Century"