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

Fra Mauro

Fra Mauro (c. 1400-1464) was an Italian cartographer and Camaldolese Monk from Venice. Although raised as a merchant and solider, he became an only somewhat hermetic monk and cartographer at the Monastery of St. Michael, located in the Venetian Lagoon on the island of Murano.

Around 1450 Mauro finished his greatest creation, a mappa mundi commonly known now as the Fra Mauro Map, which was the most detailed and accurate depiction of the world at the time. The map was commissioned by King Afonso V of Portugal for Prince Henry the Navigator, the uncle of the king.

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Frau Mauro Map Il mappamondo di fra Mauro (1459)

Commissioned by Portugese king Afonso V for his uncle Henry the Navigator, and created by a Venetian merchant-soldier turned hermetic monk, Fra Mauro's mappamundi represented a crowning achievement in late-medieval cartography.

As related by Brooks (p. 185), Mauro consulted Portuguese maps of travels of the Atlantic coast as one source for his world map. Brooks describes the map as a "circular planisphere drawn on parchment that has been set by curators in a wooden frame" which measured "about six feet in diameter" (p. 186).

Frau Mauro identifies Prester John's kingdom as an immense sub-Saharan African territory, with the land of "Abassia" at its center. Brooks notes that "Abassia is depicted in the map with large castles and palaces that exceed those of any other African potentate in opulence, size, and quantity." (pp. 186-7). Mauro notes that Prester John's territory "is more extensive to the south of the sources of the Nile than to the north" (Brooks, p. 190). Brooks notes that Mauro even offered a defense of his African cartography on the map, asserting that the catography of the antiquarian geographers was outdated.

In an inscription, Frau Mauro details this land as possessing qualites of the terrestrial paradise (qtd in Brooks, p. 187):
In the woods of this Abassia there is such a great quantity of honey that they do not bother to collect it. When in the winter the great rains wash these trees, that honey flows in some nearby lakes, and, thanks to the action of the sun, that water becomes like a wine, and the people of the place drink it in place of wine.
Speaking of the ruler of this land, Mauro relates
"Prester John has more than 120 kingdoms under his dominion, in which there are more that 60 different languages" (10-I6, trans. Brooks)

"Above the kingdom of Abbassia there is a very savage and idolotrous people who are separated from Abbassia by a river and by mountains, at the passes of which the kings of Abbassia have built great fortresses so that these peoples cannot pass and do harm to their country. These men are very strong and of great stature and they pay tribute to Prester John, King of Abassia, and certain thousands of these men serve him to his needs" (10-A38, trans. Brooks)

The original copy made for King Afonso has not survived.

A high-resolution version of the map is viewable couresy of the Museo Galileo.
Egyptus Novelo This map, a detailed depiction of the Nile Basin, which features Egypt and Ethiopia, survives in three medieval copies of Ptolemy's Geography.

It is theorized that the map was created in Florence, possibly influenced by the presence of an Ethiopian delegation at the Council of Florence (1431-1449). Its novelty (compared to contemporary maps such as that by Frau Mauro), suggests that it was created with specialized knowledge of the Nile Basin.
New, Plaine, & Exact Mapp of Africa
Peter Heylyn's 1652 Cosmographie included a world map by Nicolas Visscher that depicted the kingdom of Prester John. Despite the fact that the Dutch cartographer came from a family of mapmakers possessed of the most contemporary cartographic information, Visscher relied heavily on classical and biblical traditions in his mapmaking, which can be see in his depiction of Prester John's kingdom.

That is not to say that his map of Africa is completely inaccurate. The shape of Africa was one of the most accurate for its time and the tropics and equator were fixed precisely. Along the border of the map, Visscher depicted various African rulers, including Prester John, depicted as a youngish crowned black man and titled "King of Abissines." As Brooks notes (p. 209), the ornamentation of Prester John is compoaratively more European than that of the other African kings depicted on the map.

Prester John's Abyssinia takes up roughly a full third of Africa, hearkening back to the tradiition established by Fra Mauro in his mappaemundi.

From Brooks (p. 209):
It is also within the imagined boundaries of the kingdom of Prester John that Visscher included quite a vareity of mythical and legendary items beleived by late medieval and early modern Europeans to exist in Africa. Visscher included a "Zair Lake" from which the Congo and Nile Rivers supposedly emanated, which was a body of water that Visscher claimed was "where ye Tritons and Mermaids are said to be."

The southern borders of the laand of Prester John are the location of the Mountains of the Moon, also believed by Europeans to be the source of the Nile River.
Explore “New, Plaine, & Exact Mapp of Africa”
Alessandro Zorzi Of Allesandro Zorzi, Salvadore writes (p. 30):
Eight decades after Fra Mauro drew his Mappaemundi, a Venetian erudite by the name of Alex Zorzi started to collect information about the overseas; however, unlike a monk, he did not turn the information he collected into maps, nor would he enjoy much fame. Instead, he simply left behind itineraries and cartographical sketches of disparate faraway places and proto-ethnographic information that remained unpublished until modern times. Zorzi assembled explorers dispatched back to Europe from the least-known corners of the earth, and eyewitness accounts of visitors to Venice. His efforts resulted in two collections, one regarding the New World and the other regarding the Old World. The latter included a section on the African continent and the Muslim world in which, along with previously published travelogues of more renowned travelers of the time, one can find eight itineraries dedicated to Ethiopia's connection to the Holy Land.

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Camaldonese