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

1306 Ethiopian Embassy

In 1306, a group of Ethiopian Christians visited Pope Clement V at Avignon. According to later texts which recount the meeting, the Ethiopian ambassadors desired that their European brethren return to the true doctrine of the Christian Church.

Christianity in Ethiopia.

Although no contemporary records survive (and Krebs has cast doubt on the entire story), the event was recorded in later texts, including Giacomo Filippo Foresti da Bergamo's Supplementum Chronicarum (1483), along with texts by Chasseneux (1546), Godinho (1615), and Le Mire (1619). These later writers connected this meeting with the kingdom of Prester John, reigniting the theory of an Ethiopian John, an identification that would continue through Portugal’s sea explorations.

For more on the story of this cultural confluence, see Beckingham. Additionally, Salvadore (604-6) writes of Ethiopian Christian envoys who arrive in Italy in 1402.

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Supplementum Chronicarum
Supplementum Chronicarum (1483)

Composed by Giacomo Filippo Foresti in Bergamo and first printed in Venice in 1483, this "Latin Supplement to the Chronicles," as its name implies, takes the form of a supplement to a standard universal history.

The text, recorded in 15 books, concerns itself with the most significant characters of world history, from Greek mythological heroes to Old Testament prophet, and in so doing also includes material that related to the legend of Prester John.

Foresti comes to the subject of Prester John after a discussion of an otherwise unsubstantiated Ethiopian embassy to Europe that took place in the first decade of the fourteenth century. His discussion includes a reference to the lost map of Giovanni da Carignano's lost 1306 portolan chart, which has become to be understood by Prester John scholars to be the earliest text that places Prester John kingdom in Ethiopia.

Of the embassy, Foresti writes:
“Indeed, it is known that this emperor in the time of Clement V in the year of our Lord 1306 sent 30 legates to the king of the Spains; and let it be known that he was offering him aid against the infidels. They came also to Avignon to present themselves reverently to Clement V, the Pontifex Maximus, and instructed by many apostolic letters, they went to the well worth seeing places of the relics of the Apostles Peter and Paul in Rome. Having seen these, they returned with joy to their own home. But in Genoa they had to wait many days for the time to sail back, and while they waited, they had sat down [as] it happens and were asked much about their rites, customs and regions before they left, on which [this] same author has written.”
Bergamo's entry on the meeting goes as follows (qtd. in Silverberg, p. 165):
A certain priest [Carignano], the rector of St. Mark in Genoa, a truly excellent man, published a treatise, which he also called a 'map.' Among many things written in it about the state of this nation [Ethiopia] he reports that Prester John is set over that people as patriarch; and he says that under him are 127 archbishoprics, each of which has twenty bishops. Those who are to be reborn they baptize in the Roman manner, In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; and in the same way they celebrate the Sacrament of the Eucharist, with this one exception, that they sing the Paternoster before the elevation of the Sacrament... It is said that their emperor is most Christian, to whom seventy-four kings and almost innumerable princes pay allegiance, except those kings who observe the laws of Mahomet but submit to the emperor in other things."
Later versions contain excerpts from the Treatise on the Pontificate of Prester John, which is credited in the text to Poggio Braciolini, secretary to Pope Eugenius IV, whose source, according to Silverberg (p. 222) was Nicolò de' Conti.

Foresti mixes history and legend, treating episodes of cultural myth and Christian martyrology as historical fact. It is in this context that his account of the 1306 Ethiopian embassy to Rome should be considered.

Although once understood as the source of Giovanni da Carignano's lost account on the embassy, Verena Krebs has recently questioned the veracity not only of Foresti's account but also of the historicity of an early-fourteenth century Ethiopian embassy to Europe, citing the account's resemblance to aspects of the Prester John legend and Golden Legend along with the "socio-political entity of Solomonic Ethiopia."
Carignano Portolan Map
Carignano Portolan Map (1305-1327)

Carignano was known primarily as a cartographer and geographer, but he also wrote a now-lost treatise on Ethiopia based on an alleged meeting in Genoa with the Ethiopian embassy that traveled to Europe in 1306.

A summary of the long-lost commentary to the map can be found in Jacopo Filippo Foresti’s Supplementum Chronicarum.

Carignano's Portolan Map, based in part from the information he gleaned from the Ethiopian embassy, is the first known document to correctly situate the "black Christians" of Abyssinia/Ethiopia between the Blue and White Nile. According to Salvadore, "his was the first map to abandon the copycat style of mapmaking typical of medieval Europe, which simply proposed again and again geographical knowledge that originated in antiquity" (p. 602).

On the map, Carignano describes the land of Prester John thusly (165):
"Prester John is set over that people [Ethiopians] as patriarch; and he says that under him are 127 archbishoprics, each of which has 20 bishops. Those who are to be reborn they baptize in the Roman manner…it is said that their emperor is most Christian, to whom 74 kings and almost innumerable princes pay allegiance, except those kings who observe the laws of Mahomet but submit to the emperor in other things."

Salvadore (p. 3) elegantly captures the significance of the alleged visit that inspired the the map and and on the map itself as a bellwether inaugrating the tropes that come to dominate European discourse over the ensuing three centuries on the potential of a European-African alliance:
[T]here can be no type of conclusive interpretation of the Ethiopian transit through Genoa; yet, it remains extremely significant because it is the first recorded case of an Ethiopian visit to Europe and, if accepted as an embassy, also the first recorded African embasssy to a European sovereign. The few toponyms Carignano included on this map, along with the alleged commentary, documented not only the first timid Ethiopian steps into Europe but also the equally timid European attempts to move past a variety of myths and misconceptions of anicent and medieval derivation as to the existence, identity, and location of Christian communities beyond the Middle East. More generally, the visit adumbrates the emergence of an encounter between the Kingdom of Ethiopia an dvarious polities in Western Mediterranean Europe. It presents tropes that will appear in similar guises time and time again in the ensuing centuries: Ethiopian embassies seeking Christian allies, pious Ethiopian monks defying the odds of early modern travel to find salvation and knowledge at the heart of Western Christendom, European traders seeking commercial opportunities, and lay and ordained intellectuals, chroniclers, and mapmakeres grappling with the notion of a country to be found in the Indies and populated by black Christians.

From Beckingham (199):
"This map, which was in Florence, was destroyed during World War II, but the lower edge, where Ethiopia would have been shown, had already been severely mutilated so that the reproductions published before its disappearance can tell us little that is relevant to the embassy. It was signed Johannes presbyler rector sancti Marci de portu Janue me fecit. Fischer, who first published the map, accepted the identification of Johannes presbyter with Giovanni da Carignano, but contended that the embassy came from Persia and must have been responsible for some information about the western part of the Ilkhanid empire which the map provides.”
From Beckingham (209):
“At least since an Ethiopian embassy had come to Avignon during the papacy of Clement V (1305-14) the ruler of Ethiopia had sometimes been identified with Prester John, perhaps for the first time in the map of Giovanni da Carignano, which was destroyed during World War II. Giovanni was the priest of the harbour church of San Marco at Genoa and had himself met the envoys on their way back to Ethiopia.”
Giovanni da Carignano Born in Genoa, Giovanni da Carignano (1250-1329) was a rector and later a priest turned famed cartographer. He is known as the first European to accurately plot Ethiopia on a map, as well as the first European to locate the kingdom of Prester John in Ethiopia. Additionally, he is famous for providing the only historical evidence of the 1306 Ethiopian mission that arrived in Rome.

Carignano produced a portolan chart and commentary, both of which are now lost, the former more recently than the latter. Carignano's lost portolan map, which survives only in pre-WWII photographs, is signed "Presbiter Johannes Rector sancti Marci de portu Ianue me fecit."

Salvadore (p. 1) notes that his appointment in 1291 to the position of rector at San Marco al Molo, located in the Madraccio, Genoa's old port, provided Giovanni with a congregation of mercantile seafarers who likely shared stories of their travels.

of the San Marco Church in Genoa.

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