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

Athanasius Kircher

Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) was German Jesuit scholar considered the "Master of a Hundred Arts" who published forty books in his lifetime. His China Illustrata discusses the legend of Prester John.

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De Emendatione Temporum Written by Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) and published in 1583, De Emendatione Temporum ("Of the Correction of Times") is described by Elizabeth Ott of the Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog as an attempt to "formalize the science of chronology," drawing on "Persian, Arab, Greek, Roman, and other ancient traditions, identifying and correcting the errors of his predecessors to synchronize various cultures’ accounts of history."

Under these ambitious auspices, Scaliger authors an influential account of the Prester John legend. Attempting to reconcile the earlier theories of an Asian Prester John with the more contemporary theories of Prester John as Ethiopian negus, Scaliger proposes that Prester John led an exiled group of Mongols in Ethiopia. This group, Scaliger proposes, were sent to Africa in defeat at the hands of Ghengis Khan.

As edited in Brewer (p. 225):
In our recollection, there were in Italy certain churches of the Christian Ethiopians, who they call Abassins or Abissins... Indeed, by the navigations of the Portuguese, and by the splendid book of the journey of the Portuguese priest Francisco Alvarez, who penetrated into the inmost Ethiopia, one may learn many things about those men and their rites. Once, all Africa from the Nile's final mouth, to the Gaditan straits [i.e. the Straits of Gibraltar], and likewise from the Tyrrhenian Sea to beyond the Equinox towards the south, was full of Christian churches and cities, and this great tract of lands was obedient to the one Bishop of Alexandria. But if there are any churches remaining today in those parts, they recognise that patriarch alone, like these Ethiopians, being discussed now, and whom the lonely deserts and difficult routes defend from the general wasteland of Africa... Before the arrival of the Portuguese in Ethiopia, the name of the Ethiopian Christians alone was scarcely known to us, and their falsely named emperor Prestegiani; since that name does not belong to he who reigned in Ethiopia, but he who reigned in Asia three hundred years previously, a long way distant... they falsely call him Prestegiani, and [to say] that this Ethiopian is the same as that Asian man out of the itinerary of Paul the Venetian [i.e. Marco Polo] because they are both Christian is utter nonsense. It is indeed correct that three hundred years previously, certain Ethiopian kings ruled far and wide in Asia, especially in Drangiana, at the ends of Susa, and in India, until the emperors of the Tartars expelled them from all of Asia, and they were the first ones defeated, so they say, by Chingis, King of the Tartars, having killed their emperor Uncam... all those Ethiopians who had been thrown out of the kingdom of the Mongols and Chinese and were driven all the way to furthest Africa.

As Brewer (p. 225) mentions, Scaliger's theory was challenged by Peter Heylyn, who, in his Cosmographie (1652), writes that such a theory was "found in no record but in Scaliger's head." Others texts, such as Samuel Purchas' Purchas His Pilgrimes (1613) and Athanasius Kircher's China Illustrata (1667).
China Illustrata Jesuit scholar and "Master of a Hundred Arts" Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) compiled contemporary knowledge about China in his China Illustrata (1667).

Kircher, writing in Latin from Rome, affirms that Prester John was an Asian monarch, not an Ethiopian king, citing the then-popular theory that Pêro da Covilhã and susbequent Portuguese writers had relied on faulty linguistic link to identify Prester John with the Ethiopian negus.

Curiously, he places Prester John's kingdom not in what was understood as China but in the desert-and-mountains land stretching from Tibet to Mongolia. He cites as his authorities on this matter texts including Joseph Scaliger's "Of the Correction of Times" (1583).

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China Illustrata