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• 1 media/Atlas_Cosmographicae_Mercator_039-e1562368060635.jpeg 2015-07-14T10:19:32-07:00 Three Indias 15 image_header 2024-01-21T17:35:41-08:00

  According to the Letter of Prester John, "Our magnificence dominates the Three Indias, and our land extends from farthest India, where the body of St. Thomas the Apostle rests, to the place where the sun rises, and returns by slopes to the Babylonian Desert near the Tower of Babel."
  
  Much has been written on the vast (and vague) geography that composed the region known to Europeans as India in the Middle Ages.
  
  The three medieval “Indias” consisted of:

  • Greater India: southern and coastal Indian subcontinent and areas east
  • Lesser India: north of subcontinent, focused around the Indus River
  • Middle India / Third India: Ethiopia/Abyssinia and portions of Persia and Media—sometimes the area between the Nile and the Red Sea, the very region from which the first news of Prester John reportedly arrived
  Altogether, "India" could denote any land east of the Nile and west of Cathay. It is not surprising then that the term "India" was often meant to conjure the idea of vast eastern, non-Christian space.

  Hamilton points out that earlier writers had already subdivided Middle India in three types of Ethiopians, one of which being Indians, exemplified by Gervase of Tilbury (1150-1220) in his encyclopedic Otia Imperiali (b. 1220).  

  
  
  For an exhaustive study of medieval geography and the myths that influenced it, see John Kirtland Wright, especially pp. 155-60.