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

Giacomo Filippo Foresti da Bergamo

An Augustinian monk, biblical scholar, and author of several early printed works, Foresti (1434-1520) composed the Supplementum Chronicarum.

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Supplementum Chronicarum
Supplementum Chronicarum (1483)

Composed by Giacomo Filippo Foresti da Bergamo and first printed in Venice in 1483, this "Latin Supplement to the Chronicles," as its name implies, takes the form of a supplement to a standard universal history.

The text, recorded in 15 books, includes material that related to the legend of Prester John, including a reference to the lost map of Giovanni da Carignano's lost 1306 portolan chart, which has become to be understood by Prester John scholars to be the earliest text that places Prester John kingdom in Ethiopia.

Later versions contain excerpts from the Treatise on the Pontificate of Prester John, which is credited in the text to Poggio Braciolini, secretary to Pope Eugenius IV, whose source, according to Silverberg (p. 222) was Nicolò de' Conti.

Foresti mixes history and legend, treating episodes of cultural myth and Christian martyrology as historical fact. It is in this context that his account of the 1306 Ethiopian embassy to Rome should be considered.

Although once understood as the source of Giovanni da Carignano's lost account on the embassy, Verena Krebs has recently questioned the veracity not only of Foresti's account but also of the historicity of an early-fourteenth century Ethiopian embassy to Europe, citing the account's resemblance to aspects of the Prester John legend and Golden Legend along with the "socio-political entity of Solomonic Ethiopia."

Bergamo's entry on the meeting goes as follows (qtd. in Silverberg, p. 165):
A certain priest [Carignano], the rector of St. Mark in Genoa, a truly excellent man, published a treatise, which he also called a 'map.' Among many things written in it about the state of this nation [Ethiopia] he reports that Prester John is set over that people as patriarch; and he says that under him are 127 archbishoprics, each of which has twenty bishops. Those who are to be reborn they baptize in the Roman manner, In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; and in the same way they celebrate the Sacrament of the Eucharist, with this one exception, that they sing the Paternoster before the elevation of the Sacrament... It is said that their emperor is most Christian, to whom seventy-four kings and almost innumerable princes pay allegiance, except those kings who observe the laws of Mahomet but submit to the emperor in other things."
Treatise on the Pontificate of Prester John Printed in Cologne around 1499, this text represents another of the handful of "chapbook" compendiums of Prester John lore that began to circulate at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries.

The printer, Cornelis de Zierikzee assembled the Latin Letter of Prester John along with the De adventu, in addition to borrowing without acknowledgement the Prester John narrative contained in Jacopo Filippo Foresti's Supplementum Chronicarum.