The International Prester John Project: How A Global Legend Was Created Across Six Centuries Main Menu Path One: 1122-1235 Path Two: 1236-1310 AD Path Three : 1311-1460 AD Path Four : 1461-1520 AD Path Five: 1521-1699 AD Path Six: 1700-1800 AD Global Middle Ages

Introduction

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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.



Rather than another political hoax faded from historical memory, Prester John’s kingdom became a historical destination, a place that merchants and missionaries, cartographers and romancers, could imagine and re-imagine the horizons of Christian possibility.


“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.


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.

Contents of this path:

  1. Introduction: The Letter
  2. Introduction: Project Overview
  3. Composite Map
  4. What's To Come...

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