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

Giuliano Dati

Giuliano Dati (1445-1524) was an Italian priest (later bishop of San Leone in Calabria) and poet who composed two texts inspired by the legend of Prester John, in addition to his most famous work, a rhymed version of the the letter sent by the admiral of Christopher Columbus relating his adventures and discoveries.

Inspired by Andrea de Barberino's Guerrino Il Meschino, Dati's The Great Magnificence of Prester John, Lord of Greater India and of Ethiopia is one of the fullest fictional expressions of the legend composed in the age of the Prester John chapbook.

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Il Guerrin Meschino Il Libro del Meschino di Durazzo (written c. 1409; published 1473)

Written in Florence by Andrea da Barberino in eight chapters, Guerino Il Meschino (Guerin the Wretched) was one of several of Barberino's compositions written in the early fifteenth-century that commented on early medieval themes.

Here the author offers a narrative of global travel that draws on the popular imaginiative travel literature of the late fourteenth century. While Barberino was known to build on French sources for his Italian narratives, this romance appears to have no basis in earlier French narrative.

Instead, like the imaginitive travel narratives it bears resemblence to, Barberino draws on a variety of sources ranging from the Alexander Romance to Dante to Ptolemy. Insofar as he makes his title character a descendent of the Carolingian dynasty, this narrative can, however, be loosely classified as part of the "Matter of France."

First circulating in manuscript and then printed in Padua in 1473, Meschino details the journey of a young man in the imperial court of Constantinople who wandered the ninth-century world, all the way to the kingdom of Prester John, seeking information about his parents. This search for his family is also understood as a search for his identity as a warrior, thus bearing on the chivalric themes so popular of this era of romance.

The prose romance draws much on the Mandevillian Style of travel lore in which a character follows a somewhat versimilar travel route through the Holy Land before arriving in India at the kingdom of Prester John. Upon discovering Prester John and his kingdom, the reader is treated to an extensive description of the Prester's opulent palace. After a battle, Guerino is offered half of India by the Prester himself.

Following his encounter with Prester John, Guerino journeys back westeward through Rome and Spain before finally finding his parents, here described as the King and Queen of Durazzo, perhaps a nod to erstwhile King of Naples, Jerusalem, and Hungrary Charles of Durazzo (1345-1386).

Olschki (p. 96) describes the text as "the most popular volume of fictional geography," a popular genre of the late-middle ages. Barberino's text influenced Dati's The Great Magnificence of Prester John (ca. 1499).

Rogers contextualizes:
A Near Easterner who journeyed to the Farther East and subsequently visited Pope Eugenius II (reigned 824 to 827) provides the subject of an Italian story, Guerino il Meschino, which has retained its popular appeal down the centuries and was well known to Dati.

Allaire has analyzed the text's portrayal of Muslims. Like the St. Thomas legends, Guerrino Il Meschino portrays a floating coffin.

Guerrino Il Meschino was made into a film in 1950.
Path Four : 1461-1520 AD Prester John and the Project of European Colonialism

While Age of Discovery figures such as Henry the Navigator, the Christopher Columbus, and Duarte Lopes allude to John’s kingdom as a guarantor of Eastern riches. A related history of John’s kingdom in Ethiopia/Abyssinia held Western attention through the European exploration of Africa. However, in this era the accounts of Prester John are more varied than of any other era. Here Prester John serves both as historical and literary figure, as both magnificent ruler and overblown myth.

In 1482, Francisco Suriano, in his Iter, mentions arriving at the court of Prester John, a primitive place in which ten Italians were currently living, and paints a picture of mud huts and simple churches; Vasco da Gama’s Roteiro mentions the desire to make contact with Prester John; in 1499, Italian poet Guiliano Dati, composes a pair of poems on on Prester John (“Treatise on the Supreme Prester John, Pope and Emperor of India” and “Ethiopia and Second Song of India”); in 1500, a letter from “Johannes Africanus” materializes, detailing how Prester John, once mighty and powerful, is now a humble steward and laborer (guilty of pride).

In Orlando Furioso, Ariosto features an Ethiopian priest-king called Senapo who rules over an immensely wealthy kingdom and controls the flow of the Nile River—the very river that dashed crusader hopes during the Fifth Crusade. Although Ariosto’s is a highly satirical text, his inclusion of the legend shows how, even in the sixteenth century, writers were still attempting to create a plausible backstory to unite the imaginative interest in the legend with a history from which he may have emerged. John retains his historical place independent of the romance landscape he also inhabits well into the eighteenth century.