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

Chinggis Khan

The man born as Temüjin (1162-1227) was born to a Mongol chieftan named Yesukai and his second wife Hoelun. After establishing the Kerait people as allies, Temüjin's father Yesukai was poisoned as he was on the verge of uniting most or all of the Mongol khanates— his son was 13.

Temüjin became Chinggis (or Genghis) Khan in 1206 after defeating the Khereid leader Ong Khan and subsequently uniting (or slaughtering) the proximate nomadic tribes to form the Mongol Empire.

During his lifetime, Chinggis conquered much of the Central and Eastern Asia. His domain spread from the Amur River in Manchuria to Great Wall of China in the South to mountains of Siberia in the north to the dry Tarim Basin in the West, establishing the Mongol Empire as the largest contiguous empire in history.

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Chronicon Syriacum
Makhtbhanuth Zabhne (c. 1258-1286)

Bar-Hebraeus's Chronicle, written in Syriac, aspires to narrate world history from Creation until the current day, in two books (concerning secular and sacred history, respectively).

In the Chronicon Syriacum, which concerns civil and political history, Bar-Hebraeus records an occurrence in the early eleventh century that connects to the legend of Prester John. According to the Chronicon the Mongol Keraits of the East Steppe adopted Nestorian Christianity in 1007. This is significant insofar as the early European legends speaking of a powerful Indian prince John cast this figure too as Nestorian and it was not known at that time whether or not Nestorian Christianity had spread that far east.

Bar-Hebraeus then goes on to mention that it was a King David who, as chief of these same Keraits, was defeated in 1202 by Genghis Khan, who was once King John's vassal. The Syriac documentation of this events matches those of western authors, including the narrative of Marco Polo's journey. There, however, King David/Prester John is known as Ong Khan.

From Silverberg:
How are we to account for William’s [of Rubruck] linking of Togrul and Kuchluk the Naiman (‘King or Presbyter John’)? They were in fact not brothers, nor of the same tribe, nor of the same generation, nor could Togril, who died in 1203, possibly have succeeded to the throne of Kuchluk, who outlived him by sixteen years. A clue to the source of his error can be found in the Chronicon Syriacum of the Syrian cleric Gregory Abulfaraj Bar-Hebraeus, who lived from 1226 to 1286: speaking of the conversion of the Keraits to Christianity, he notes that in the time of the Mongol dominion they were ruled by an ‘Ung Khan who is called Malik Yuhanna,’ that is, ‘King John.’

See Brewer (pp. 169-170) for the English translation of the account of Prester John in the Chronicon.
The Travels of Marco Polo
Devisement du monde (c. 1298)

The Devisement (or Livres des merveilles du monde) remains one of the most well-known narratives to survive the Middle Ages. Dictated by an imprisoned Marco Polo to fellow inmate and veteran romancer Rustichello da Pisa, the book records– and sometimes embellishes– the travels of Polo (along with his father and uncle) to the court of Kublai Khan in the late-thirteenth century.

Although written in French, the text was quickly translated into Italian and Latin. More than one hundred manuscripts survive, each slightly different from the others. The Travels became a medieval best seller, even though the imaginative flourishes of copyists makes it difficult to determine what the original text might have looked like.

Marco Polo's Travels features the figure of Prester John in a number of chapters (64-68, 74, 109-110, 139, 200). Polo, following the Dominican missionaries that visited the Mongol Empire before him, relates a tale of Prester John that demystifies the legendary qualities of the letter all the while testifying to the historical existence of an eastern Christian prince.

For Marco Polo, Prester John (or Un-khan) was a powerful prince who ruled over the Tartars (Mongols), but was overthrown, in a battle Polo himself describes, by Genghis/Chinggis Khan. Later, in the mid-14th century, the imaginary travels of Sir John Mandeville will crib from Polo's now-canonical observations about the east.

Silverberg (p. 132) puts Marco Polo's reduction of the Prester John legend succinctly:
For Marco, Prester John was a khan of the steppes, and he was dead, and his descendent of the sixth generation, King George, ruled the insignificant principality of Tenduc as Kublai Khan's vassal.

Even if Polo's narrative demystified the legend of Prester John, its romance narrative style, combined with its fascinating insights, some of which related tangentially to the Prester John legend (including visiting the shrine of St. Thomas), did not ultimately do much to diminish European interest in Prester John.

Background on Polo’s expedition.
See Polo’s route.

Brewer edits and translates the Prester John portions of Polo's travels (pp. 171-188).
Silverberg excerpts the three mentions of Prester John in the Travels.
More on the travels and their veracity.
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).
History of the Mongols
Ystoria Mongalorum quos nos Tartaros appellamus (c. 1247-1250)

The first of the handful of 13th century European reports on the Mongol Empire, John of Plano Carpini's History of the Mongols is both a travel narrative and an attempted history of the Mongols.

While his report concerns a general overview of the customs, geography, and religion of the Mongols, John pays special attention to their battle strategy and military capability. In the fifth (of nine) chapter, John mentions Prester John in the larger context of a discussion of Genghis Khan. The description of Genghis Khan's 1221 military victory over a king "commonly called Prester John" is clearly inflected with imaginative flourish.

From Dawson’s English translation (p.22):
Chingis [Genghis Khan] sent another son with an army to attack the Indians, and he conquered Lesser India. These black people are Saracens, and are called Ethiopians. This army advanced to make war on the Christians in Greater India. Hearing this, the king of that country, commonly called Prester John, assembled an army and went to meet them; and he made figures of men out of copper and set them in saddles on horses, putting fire inside them, and he placed men with bellows on the horses behind the copper figures, and with many such figures and horses fitted up like this they advanced to fight the Tartars.”

Read an excerpt of History of the Mongols at the Silk Road Project.

For the Latin text, see Wyngaert.

For more on John’s report, see Bennett.
Fifth Crusade Called on the heels of three consecutive unsuccessful Crusades (including the disastrous Fourth Crusade), the notion of a Fifth Crusade was a popular topic of discussion at the Fourth Lateran Council. In the end, the beginning of the Fifth Crusade was codified in the council's final canon. Canon 71 designated June 1, 1217 as the start of the Fifth Crusade, though it was omitted from some later collections of Lateran IV Canons.

The Fifth Crusade (1217-1222) struggled to attract the patronage of earlier crusades. Lacking definitive leadership, the Crusaders elected to travel to northern African to capture Egyptian territory of the Ayyubid's for the purposes of negotiating the return of Jerusalem to Christian control. Later, the Seventh Crusade would adopt a very similar strategy. Although the capture of Damietta boded auspiciously, the crusade army was undone by a reliance on prophecy that had them heading west to Cairo. The rising of the Nile River prevented the army from advancing and they summarily captured as they retreated to Damietta.

The story goes something like this:

In 1222, intelligence relayed from Bohemond IV, ruler of the crusader state of Antioch, to Jacques de Vitry, preacher and crusade propagandist, reaches crusaders in Damietta. The intelligence, a report written in Arabic obtained from traveling spice merchants in Antioch, details the westward military progression of a certain King David, purportedly the great-grandson of the famed Prester John, a military leader who, rumor has it, has systematically destroyed Muslim armies in the east.

Jacques has the report translated immediately. Buoyed by prophecy and heedless of local conditions, the crusaders at Damietta decide to invade Cairo immediately to fulfill the prophecy, rejecting an agreement with the Sultan Al-Kamil that would have given Jerusalem back to the crusaders in exchange for Damietta. The Nile rises, turning the invasion of Cairo into defeat. The armies of the Fifth Crusade surrender to the Sultan of Egypt, Al-Kamil, Saladin’s nephew, a few weeks later.

This King David was not Prester John but, in fact, referred to Genghis Khan.
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,
History of the Tartars
Historia Tartarum (c. 1246)

Most of Ascelin’s journey to the land of the Tartars is lost, but that which remains, recorded by Simon of Saint-Quentin, was kept alive by Vincent of Beauvais in his Speculum Historiale.

As Morgan (p. 164) relates, "Simon had evidently picked up the story of Toghril's defeat at the hands of Chinggis Khan, and his subsequent death. For him, though, Chinggis's defeated enemy remains King David, son of Prester John, king of India."

In the portion of the narrative that survives (that which was transcribed by Vincent of Beauvais), Ascelin also reports that Prester John has integrated his family into the Mongol royal family by betrothing Prester John’s granddaughter to Chinggis Khan.

For more on Simon’s text and journey, see Guzman and Brewer (pp. 155-159).
De Emendatione Temporum Written by Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) and published in 1583, De Emendatione Temporum ("Of the Correction of Times") is described by Elizabeth Ott of the Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog as an attempt to "formalize the science of chronology," drawing on "Persian, Arab, Greek, Roman, and other ancient traditions, identifying and correcting the errors of his predecessors to synchronize various cultures’ accounts of history."

Under these ambitious auspices, Scaliger authors an influential account of the Prester John legend. Attempting to reconcile the earlier theories of an Asian Prester John with the more contemporary theories of Prester John as Ethiopian negus, Scaliger proposes that Prester John led an exiled group of Mongols in Ethiopia. This group, Scaliger proposes, were sent to Africa in defeat at the hands of Ghengis Khan.

As edited in Brewer (p. 225):
In our recollection, there were in Italy certain churches of the Christian Ethiopians, who they call Abassins or Abissins... Indeed, by the navigations of the Portuguese, and by the splendid book of the journey of the Portuguese priest Francisco Alvarez, who penetrated into the inmost Ethiopia, one may learn many things about those men and their rites. Once, all Africa from the Nile's final mouth, to the Gaditan straits [i.e. the Straits of Gibraltar], and likewise from the Tyrrhenian Sea to beyond the Equinox towards the south, was full of Christian churches and cities, and this great tract of lands was obedient to the one Bishop of Alexandria. But if there are any churches remaining today in those parts, they recognise that patriarch alone, like these Ethiopians, being discussed now, and whom the lonely deserts and difficult routes defend from the general wasteland of Africa... Before the arrival of the Portuguese in Ethiopia, the name of the Ethiopian Christians alone was scarcely known to us, and their falsely named emperor Prestegiani; since that name does not belong to he who reigned in Ethiopia, but he who reigned in Asia three hundred years previously, a long way distant... they falsely call him Prestegiani, and [to say] that this Ethiopian is the same as that Asian man out of the itinerary of Paul the Venetian [i.e. Marco Polo] because they are both Christian is utter nonsense. It is indeed correct that three hundred years previously, certain Ethiopian kings ruled far and wide in Asia, especially in Drangiana, at the ends of Susa, and in India, until the emperors of the Tartars expelled them from all of Asia, and they were the first ones defeated, so they say, by Chingis, King of the Tartars, having killed their emperor Uncam... all those Ethiopians who had been thrown out of the kingdom of the Mongols and Chinese and were driven all the way to furthest Africa.

As Brewer (p. 225) mentions, Scaliger's theory was challenged by Peter Heylyn, who, in his Cosmographie (1652), writes that such a theory was "found in no record but in Scaliger's head." Others texts, such as Samuel Purchas' Purchas His Pilgrimes (1613) and Athanasius Kircher's China Illustrata (1667).
An Abridgment of Ecclesiastical History Patrick Nisbet's An Abridgment of Ecclesiastical History (1776) retells the story of Prester John presented in Johann Lorenz von Mosheim's Historia Tartarorum Ecclesiastica (1741). The Abridgement is one of a handful of Enlightenment era texts that returns Prester John to the Asian Steppe using a mostly linguistic rationale.

Nisbet writes:
The cause of Christianity gained considerable ground in Asiatic Tartary, by a remarkable revolution that happened there. This was brought about by John a Presbyter, called Prester John. He was a Nestorian priest, a man of vast ambition, formed for enterprise, and distinguished by eminent talents. Upon the death of Kenchan, who reigned in the eastern part of Asia, the famous Prester John invaded his kingdom with surprising magnanmity, and proved successful. From a humble priest, he ascended to a kingly throne; and for a long time swayed a scepter over an opulent and powerful nation, who submitted to his victorious arms. He enlightened his dominions with the knowledge of the gospel, and left them to his son and successor David. But he was deprived of them toward the conclusion of this century, by Genghiz-Kan Emperor of the Tartars, a renowned and successful warrior.
Historia Tartarorum Ecclesiastica Published in Germany in 1741, Johann Lorenz von Mosheim's Historia Tartarorum Ecclesiastica is very much similar to Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia before him and Patrick Nisbet in his An Abridgment of Ecclesiastical History (1776) after.

Von Mosheim describes the emergence of Prester John in the Mongol era, following the death of "Coiremchan, otherwise called Kencham":
it was invaded, with such uncommon valour and success, by a Nestorian priest, whose name was John, that it fell before his victorious arms, and acknowledged this warlike and enterprising presbyter, as its monarch. This was the famous Prester John, whose territory was, for a long time, considered by the Europeans as a second paradise, as the seat of opulence and complete felicity. As he was a presbyter before his elevation to the royal dignity, many continued to call him presbyter John, even when he was seated on the throne but his kingly name was Ungchan (qtd. in Brewer, p. 261)
He then retells the oft-repeated story of King David, Prester John's son, and the former's defeat at the hands of Genghis Khan.
Chronica Regni Siciliae Acccording to Brewer (p. 277), this chronicle written by Richard of San Germano contains a "notice that the then King of Hungary (Andrew II) sent word to the Pope (Honorius III) informing him of the conquests of Chingis Khan in Russia, but styling him 'rex Dauit, qui presbiter lohannes dicebarur in uulgari ' [King David, who is called Prester John in the common tongue].

Richard also noted that 'Septem anni errant quod de India exiuerat, corpus afferens beati Thome apostoli, et uno die de Ruteis et Plautis occiderant ducenta milia' . [They have journeyed for seven years since they left India, carrying with them the body of blessed Thomas the Apostle, and in one day they killed 200,000 Russians and Cumans]."