In a global Middle Ages, there are few individuals, fictional
or historical, who have secured a more lasting impact on the way that
Europeans came to know the world than Prester John.
A product of anxious cultural imaginings mixed with hope for historical
change, Prester John has engaged the imagination of an increasingly
diverse audience since 1145. Over the course of six centuries, Prester
John figured centrally in Christendom’s understanding of what the distant
world was like: crusading aspirations depended on his
materialization; missionary undertakings in the East leveraged their
chances of converting natives against a presumption of his existence, and,
mercantile-minded men from Marco Polo through Christopher Columbus dreamt
of the putative riches of his kingdom.

 “The Peregrinations of Prester John” affords the opportunity
for users to experience the legend’s unfolding, piece-by-piece, as it
swept up half of the world, from 1150 to 1700. The project tells the story
of Prester John across the centuries during which legendary material
accrued and alongside the geographies the myth touched and helped shape.

Most crucially, this project shows that Prester John cannot be confined
solely to the Middle Ages or to the recesses of the “premodern.” As will
become clear, the popularity of the legend actually increases steadily
over the five hundred year period this project traces. Rather than a
vestige of medieval superstition and belief, Prester John figures
crucially in the project of European modernity. 

By plotting the proposed locations of John’s kingdom in line
with the experiences of the authors responsible for these speculations,
one begins to see the degree to which medieval and early modern writers
used the idea of Prester John legend to create a global vision generated
at the interstices of fact and fiction. As the maps shift over time— and
with them, John’s kingdom— the degree to which Prester John’s kingdom
helped determine the shape of the world begins to materialize.