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

Emperor Charles IV

Emperor Charles IV was both the recepient of a letter allegedly from the Ethiopian king asking for military alliance as well as the addressee on a fiftteenth-century Letter of Prester John.

In addition, he commissioned John de'Marignolli's History of Bohemia, which discusses the land of Prester John in Ethiopia surrounded by the biblical river Gyon, which has now come to be known, according to the author, as the Nile.

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Path Three : 1311-1460 AD From Ethiopian Embassy to Europe through the Age of Exploration

As travel to the Mongol Empire subsumed Prester John within a different cultural history, those invested in the legend developed strategies to assure European audiences that John need not be precisely known in order to exist (and to matter). Since its advent, the efficacy of the legend depended, at least partially, on the unknowability of the Eastern geographies over which John claimed to rule. However, once increased travel began to reveal a less exotic “India” than the legend’s adherents had anticipated, the legend risked becoming outmoded by the comparatively accurate historical reports of travelers returning from these lands.

However, even as the Letter’s promises remained undiscovered, many refused to relinquish faith in the legend: the messianic comforts of a future delivered of Western turmoil (lack of stable leadership, fear of Muslim ascendency) had taken hold of too many Europeans. In order to combat the sober accounts of travelers who affirmed the defeat of Prester John, the physical location of John’s kingdom was constantly (and necessarily) re-imagined in order to sustain the belief that this kingdom was alive and well, despite the failures by those who sought it.

Some ten years after Marco Polo returned to the West, another Prester John letter surfaces, allegedly sent by John to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, signaling a new chapter in the legend of Prester John. As with the integration of Prester John into the cultural fabric of the Mongols, this new wave of Prester John lore tied the king to a new group of "others" who recently entered into the European consciousness: Ethiopian Christians.

Just as thirteenth-century writers integrated the legend of Prester John into their developing understanding of the Mongols on the Steppe, a number of fourteenth-century travelers relocated John’s kingdom to Ethiopia/Abyssinia, or “Middle India.” 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. This time, rather than a defeated underling of Chinggis Khan, Prester John became a luxuriously wealthy Christian king.

Friar Jordanus of Séverac (c. 1320) writes of a dragon-filled kingdom of Prester John in Ethiopia; in the mid fourteenth century, The Book of the Knowledge of All the Kingdoms, Lands, and Lordships That Are in the World claimed that Prester John was the patriarch of Nubia and Abyssinia; Henry the Navigator commissioned explorations of Africa were rooted in the hope of an Ethiopian Prester John.

Thus, during the fourteenth century, writers connected this meeting with the kingdom of Prester John and re-ignited the theory of an Ethiopian John, an identification that would continue through Portugal’s sea explorations.

By the fifteenth century, this identification largely remains in place, with a few notable exceptions. In 1409, Andrea da Barberino pens his Guerrino il Meschino, “a fantastic and confused description of the countries and wonders of Tartary, India, and other regions of Asia and Africa” (Olschki, 96).
Chronica Boemorum John de' Marignolli's History of Bohemia (c. 1355), commissioned by Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV (r. 1346-1378), is composed in the style of a universal history and includes a lengthy detour to the Orient, which identifies associates Ethiopia as “the land of Prester John” and notes the kingdom’s proximity to the terrestrial paradise with the ability to control the Nile River. The text survives in three manuscripts.

Kurt cites the relevant passage (p. 6):
‘The Gyon River ... surrounds the country of Ethiopia, where are only black men, and which is called the land of Prester John. It is thought that this river is the Nile, which descends to Egypt, across a place called Abasty [Abasia, Abyssinia], where are Christians of the apostle St Matthew.’

From Silverberg (p. 170):
John de' Marignolli wrote an account of his Eastern travels which, in the words of his nineteenth-century translator Henry Yule, is to be found, 'like unexpected fossils in a mud-bank, imbedded in a Chronicle of Bohemia' that he composed about 1355. This lengthy interpolation enters the chronicle on the flimsiest of pretenses: Marignolli chooses to begin his history of Bohemia with the Creation and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, and, having got as far as the statement that Eden is located "beyond India," is reminded that he himself once visited India, which leads him to say, "And now to insert some brief passages of what I have seen myself ... " An anecdotal description of the Orient that runs to more than fifty printed pages follows.
Letter of Prester John to Emperor Charles IV
Letter of Prester John to Emperor Charles IV (c. 1370)

This letter, apparently produced in the same general era as the alleged 1306 Ethiopian embassy to Europe, exhorts the Holy Roman emperor to join the Ethiopian king in a crusade against Islam. Although it deviates from the standard Letter of Prester John, it is, like its predecessor, almost certainly a forgery.

Published by Leone del Prete in 1857, the Italian text, the manuscript of which is still housed in Florence, has been used as indirect evidence of the historicity of that 1306 embassy. Within the letter, the author makes reference to "other times we sent you an embassy and we did not receive an answer," which scholars have linked to the 1306 embassy. The letter's author signs the text "Re Voddomaradeg figliulo del ecclentissimo Re d'Etiopia, di Saionio, di Tobbia, di Nubbia, di terra di Bettesi e di Moritoro, e Preste Gian Re dell'India maggiore e minore."

Salvadore (pp. 602-3) describes the context surrounding the anonymous letter:
“The only other source relevant for this first Ethiopian expedition to Italy is a letter allegedly sent by Prester John to Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV (1316-1378). The letter was certainly a European forgery; nevertheless, it indirectly confirms that the Ethiopian emperor Wedem Ra’ad, known in Renaissance Europe as the author, signed it as ‘King Voddomaradeg, son of the most excellent King of Ethiopia.’ Voddomaradeg represents quite a syllabic stretch from Wedem Ra’ad, but it confirms that the emperor had made himself known in Europe, most likely through the mission that reached Avignon via Rome and Genoa. What persuaded Wedem Ra’ad to send representatives to Europe? Had he been inspired by the Portuguese reconquista that had been completed in 1249 and whose echoes had reached Jerusalem and ultimately the Ethiopian Highlands? The encounter seems to be the first of a series of attempts that Ethiopian rulers made to establish formal contact with European elites on the basis of a common Christian identity. The quest for distant allies was not an Ethiopian fantasy, but rather the consequence of a desire that was reciprocated on the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea."

Read the Italian edition of the letter.

See also Kaplan, 51-62.

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