Era One Map: Author Origins, Text Origins, Author Travel
The map above plots these early beginnings of the legend. This first era is defined as the period that begins the legend through the events of the Fifth Crusade, an event which solidified the real historical repercussions engendered by the belief in the western arrival of Prester John.
Beyond the Legend
The rumors of a powerful Eastern Christian king found early support in the travels of the Spanish merchant Benjamin of Tudela. Benjamin,who traveled between 1159 and 1173, ventured as far as Basrah, Iraq (see map below). In his Travels, which were recorded in Hebrew, he mentions a powerful Eastern king called Kofar al-Turak whom some readers mistook for the Prester John of the Letter and Otto’s chronicle. Due perhaps to Benjamin’s narrative, some of the earliest copies of the Letter are in Hebrew, a feature of the legend that has also linked the figure of Prester John to the enigmatic tradition of the Sefer Eldad. Given the prophetic tone that informed the early mentions of Prester John, it is not surprising that early adherents to the legend looked backwards to earlier texts and projected Prester John forward in time to confirm the fantasies of an Eastern Christian splendor. Readers found precedent in in Eusebius of Caesarea’s figure “John the Presbyter of Syria” for instance.
Given the prophetic tone that informed the early mentions of Prester John, it is not surprising that early adherents to the legend looked backwards to earlier texts and projected Prester John forward in time to confirm the fantasies of an Eastern Christian splendor. Readers found precedent in in Eusebius of Caesarea’s figure “John the Presbyter of Syria” for instance. More drastically, Prester John finds his way into Arthurian lore via Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.
Written in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, Wolfram’s Parzival offers readers the most elaborate medieval presentation of the Grail legend of the time. Framed as something of a rejoinder to the Chrétien de Troyes’s incomplete Perceval, Wolfram’s narrative follows an enigmatic source, Kyot, through whom the reader is granted access to “heathen” Arabic material essential to the story of the Grail but absent in Chrétien.
Among Wolfram’s inventions to the narrative is the inclusion of Feirefiz, the pagan half-brother to Parzival, an equal in knightly virtue and ability and distinguished primarily by his mottled black and white skin. Feirefiz, who falls in love with the Grail’s maiden, Repanse de Schoye, decides to accept baptism in order to be closer to his love, an act that also allows him to see the Grail. Soon after, Parzival decides to pass the Grail onto Feirefiz, who marries the Grail maiden, returns to the East to preach Christianity, and gives birth to a son, the future keeper of the Grail. That son is Prester John, whose name thereafter becomes the official title of Indian kings.
In Parzival, Wolfram not only incorporates Prester John into Arthurian lore, he consequently builds John into English history. Prester John becomes a distant descendent of Parzival, himself a distant descendent of Arthur, and yet Wolfram also maintains John’s uncanny, hybrid status in the minds of his readers. As the son of the mottled Feirefiz, Wolfram’s Prester John is himself marked, genealogically and physically, as simultaneously European and Other.
Yet while the text integrates John into the Matter of England, Parzival makes no explicit reference to the legend of Prester John. Rather than accrete onto what is already a dense historical tradition, Wolfram connects the two worlds, un-knowing the Prester John legend in order to begin a tradition that might better amplify John’s relevance to Wolfram’s audience.
This page has paths:
- Era One: 1122-1220 AD Christopher Taylor // christopher.eric.taylor@gmail.com