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

Bernard Hamilton

B. Hamilton, "Continental Drift," in Prester John, the Mongols, and the Ten Lost Tribes, ed. C.F Beckingham and B. Hamilton. London: Variorum, 1996.

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Three Indias 15 image_header 2024-01-21T17:35:41-08:00
According to the Letter of Prester John, "Our magnificence dominates the Three Indias, and our land extends from farthest India, where the body of St. Thomas the Apostle rests, to the place where the sun rises, and returns by slopes to the Babylonian Desert near the Tower of Babel."

Much has been written on the vast (and vague) geography that composed the region known to Europeans as India in the Middle Ages.

The three medieval “Indias” consisted of:
- Greater India: southern and coastal Indian subcontinent and areas east
- Lesser India: north of subcontinent, focused around the Indus River
- Middle India / Third India: Ethiopia/Abyssinia and portions of Persia and Media—sometimes the area between the Nile and the Red Sea, the very region from which the first news of Prester John reportedly arrived
Altogether, "India" could denote any land east of the Nile and west of Cathay. It is not surprising then that the term "India" was often meant to conjure the idea of vast eastern, non-Christian space.
Hamilton points out that earlier writers had already subdivided Middle India in three types of Ethiopians, one of which being Indians, exemplified by Gervase of Tilbury (1150-1220) in his encyclopedic Otia Imperiali (b. 1220).

For an exhaustive study of medieval geography and the myths that influenced it, see John Kirtland Wright, especially pp. 155-60.
Ong Khan
Ong Khan, alternately known as Unc Khan, Toghril, Tooril Khan, Unach, King David, and King John was the Khereid ruler in the late 12th/early 13th centuries. The title ong is the Mongol form of the Chinese honorific wang meaning 'universal' (Hamilton, p. 248).

Reportedly a Nestorian Christian– although according to Bar Hebraeus' Chronicon Syriacum, a lapsed one– "Unach" Khan was killed by his blood brother and subordinate, the soon-to-be Genghis Khan, who was acting on rumors that a jealous Unc was planning to kill him.

This is the same figure known in other mid-thirteenth century texts as King David, son of Prester John.

Ong Khan figures in a number of Prester John narratives, including the Historia Tartarum (c. 1246), William of Rubruck's Itinerarium (c. 1253), the Chronicon Syriacum, Marco Polo's Travels,
Nile River Part of the European fascination with the Nile River comes from its reputation as one of the four biblical rivers mentioned in Genesis. Along with the Euphrates, Hiddekel (Tigris), P(h)ison (Ganges), there was the Gehon, which due its biblical association with Ethiopia (Genesis 2:13), came to be understood as the Nile (Hamilton, p. 239).
And the name of the second river is Gehon: the same is it that compasseth all the land of Ethiopia.
(Douay-Rheims)
Over the medieval period, the Nile gathered a nearly mythical reputation. It's headwaters were located at the so-called Mountains of the Moon.
And, of course, there was the notion that the Ethiopian negus, often associated with Prester John, could control the flow of the river, with the implied or explicit threat of diverting water from Egypt or flooding the country.

According to Adam Knobler, the association of the Ethiopian negus with the ability to control the Nile River dates back to the reign of the Fatimid sultan al-Mustansir Billah (r. 1036-1094). As Knobler notes (p. 204),
when a flood in Ethiopia failed to have any effect on the Nile. The sultan, in desperation, sent Patriarch Michael of Alexandria to Ethiopia to request a restoration of the river’s flow which, following the breaking of a mound, they did. From this point onward, the Ethiopians often claimed power over the Nile’s flow.
See the list of texts below that comment on Prester John's ability to control the flow of the Nile.
Prophecy of Hannan, son of Agip As Hamilton explains (p. 244),
Before the capture of Damietta in November 1219, the pope's legate, Cardinal Pelagius, was shown a copy of the prophecy attributed to Hannan son of Agip. This was written in Arabic and seems to have been an update of the work of a ninth-century Nestorian scholar, Hunain Ibn Ishak. Because of its contents I am inclined to think that this copy had been produced by the Copts although this is by no means certain.