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

Franciscans

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John of Plano Carpini
Born in central Italy, Giovanni da Pian Del Carpini (1185-1252), also known as John of Plano Carpini, was a Franciscan monk and Papal envoy. John traveled to Karakorum in 1247 on behalf of Pope Innocent IV in order to persuade the Great Khan (Güyük Khan) to convert to Christianity. He was a keen observer of his surroundings. Upon his return, John delivered to the Pope a letter from the Great Khan that vows to protect all Christians if the Pope submitted to the Mongol leader. Although the letter and John's report were greeted with skepticism, the notion of a letter sent from an arrogant eastern ruler offering strings-attached support of the church certainly resonated with similarly structured assurances from Prester John. John relates the story of his travel in his Ystoria Mongalorum.

View an annotated map of Carpini's travels created by students from Washington & Lee University.

Read Stephen Bennett's analysis of the mission.
European Contact with the Mongol Empire On his pilgrimage from Spain to the Holy Land, Benjamin of Tudela (c. 1165) described an encounter with powerful Eastern king, called Kofar-al-Turak, increasing Western interest in the Mongols but hardly shedding light on the Prester John legend. By 1241 groups of Mongol warriors had traveled across the Asian Steppe and entered into Poland, Hungary, and the Danube Valley. Half a decade later, eastbound travelers returned to the Latin West with even more first-hand intelligence about the Mongols whom the crusading advocates of the previous century had fleshed out into the fiction of Prester John.

Already in 1245, Innocent IV had sent Franciscan John of Plano Carpini to the East to deliver letters to the Mongol khan, inviting the khan to embrace Christianity. The resulting journey, the most widely known of all early Western accounts with Mongols, describes “Ethiopians” from the lands of Prester John: here John has already lost his place at the head of Eastern politics.

Prester John plays no part in John's mission to guarantee cooperation from the Great Khan. Later narratives, including those of Ascelin of Lombardia (1245-48) , André de Longjumeau (1249), Joinville’s Chronicle, and John Mandeville allude to a union between these Mongols and Prester John. John of Monte Corvino (c. 1294) brought back a more reliable account of Indian Christians than had been circulating previously in the West but does not explicitly mention Prester John. Other travelers, including William of Rubruck (c. 1253), Marco Polo (c. 1269-99), and Odoric of Pordenone (1320s) attempt to rationalize the assumptions regarding a kingdom of Prester John as fantastical extrapolations of minor Eastern truths.

Even when these writers undercut some of the splendor of John’s kingdom, they keep him alive figuratively and literally. To ally Prester John with the Mongols may seem like a threat to the legend’s persistence, but in fact these travelers were updating the legend of Prester John by integrating John into the genealogy of an Eastern people foremost in the minds of Western leaders since the mid-thirteenth century. Even as some writers describe the legend as an exaggeration, their authority is restricted by the fact that none of these travelers claimed to have met the enigmatic figure.