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

John of Plano Carpini

Born in central Italy, Giovanni da Pian Del Carpini (1185-1252), also known as John of Plano Carpini, was a Franciscan monk and Papal envoy. John traveled to Karakorum in 1247 on behalf of Pope Innocent IV in order to persuade the Great Khan (Güyük Khan) to convert to Christianity. He was a keen observer of his surroundings. Upon his return, John delivered to the Pope a letter from the Great Khan that vows to protect all Christians if the Pope submitted to the Mongol leader. Although the letter and John's report were greeted with skepticism, the notion of a letter sent from an arrogant eastern ruler offering strings-attached support of the church certainly resonated with similarly structured assurances from Prester John. John relates the story of his travel in his Ystoria Mongalorum.

View an annotated map of Carpini's travels created by students from Washington & Lee University.

Read Stephen Bennett's analysis of the mission.

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William of Rubruck
Born in Flanders, William of Rubruck (1220-1293) was perhaps the most memorable of the Franciscan monks who traveled to the Mongol empire in the middle of the thirteenth century. His Itinerarium influenced a number of subsequent texts.

While accompanying King Louis IX of France in Constantinople during the Seventh Crusade (1248-1254), William was commissioned to travel east in order to convert the Tatars to Christianity. Specifically, William was tasked with investigating rumors of Nestorian Christians among the Mongol cities.

Following the route of fellow Franciscan missionary-adventurer John of Plano Carpini, William reached Mongolia in December 1253 and met with Möngke Khan. His entire journey took three years. Upon returning to the West, William presented King Louis with the Itinerarium, a carefully observed ethnography which records the nuances of Mongol culture and geography, and also offers an account of the journey itself.

View an annotated map of William's travels created by students from Washington & Lee University.
Travels of William of Rubruck
Itinerarium fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis de ordine fratrum Minorum, Galli, Anno gratia 1253 ad partes Orientales (c. 1253-1255)

William of Rubruck's Itinerarium records the Franciscan missionary's quest, ordered by King Louis IX, to convert the Tatars to Christianity and to gauge their potential as crusading allies.

Like John of Plano Carpini's Ystoria Mongalorum, William's Itinerarium records basic observations about the geography, culture, religion, and daily life of the Mongols. William's account has been more historically useful due to his incisive observations and his clear writing style. As Brewer (p. 162) notes, William was the first European to cast doubt on the veracity of the Prester John legends, though he does buy into Prester John's historical reality.

In Chapter 17 William writes of a powerful Naiman (Nestorian) shepherd who rose to power as King John at the beginning of the twelfth century during the power vacuum created by the death of the "Gürkhan." William is careful to note that the rumors that began to spread about this King John are exaggerations.

From Dawson’s English translation (122-23):
In a certain plain among these pasture lands [of the Carcathayans] was a Nestorian, a mighty shepherd and lord of all the people called Naimans, who were Nestorian Christians. On the death of Coir Chan, this Nestorian set himself as king and the Nestorians called him King John, and they used to tell of him ten times more than the truth. For the Nestorians coming from these parts do this kind of thing-- out of nothing they make a great rumour… I passed through his pasture lands and nobody knew anything about him with the exception of a few Nestorians.
[...]
This John had a brother by the name of Unc, like him a mighty shepard, and he was beyond the pastures of these Carcathayans, separated from his brother by a distance of three weeks’ journey, and he was lord of a little town called Caracorum,... King John died without an heir and his brother Unc grew rich and had himself called Chan and used to send his herds and flocks as far as the Mongol boundaries… And the Tartars and Mongols made him their leader and captain.”

See also this useful online article on William and his travels.
More on William of Rubruck.
European Contact with the Mongol Empire On his pilgrimage from Spain to the Holy Land, Benjamin of Tudela (c. 1165) described an encounter with powerful Eastern king, called Kofar-al-Turak, increasing Western interest in the Mongols but hardly shedding light on the Prester John legend. By 1241 groups of Mongol warriors had traveled across the Asian Steppe and entered into Poland, Hungary, and the Danube Valley. Half a decade later, eastbound travelers returned to the Latin West with even more first-hand intelligence about the Mongols whom the crusading advocates of the previous century had fleshed out into the fiction of Prester John.

Already in 1245, Innocent IV had sent Franciscan John of Plano Carpini to the East to deliver letters to the Mongol khan, inviting the khan to embrace Christianity. The resulting journey, the most widely known of all early Western accounts with Mongols, describes “Ethiopians” from the lands of Prester John: here John has already lost his place at the head of Eastern politics.

Prester John plays no part in John's mission to guarantee cooperation from the Great Khan. Later narratives, including those of Ascelin of Lombardia (1245-48) , André de Longjumeau (1249), Joinville’s Chronicle, and John Mandeville allude to a union between these Mongols and Prester John. John of Monte Corvino (c. 1294) brought back a more reliable account of Indian Christians than had been circulating previously in the West but does not explicitly mention Prester John. Other travelers, including William of Rubruck (c. 1253), Marco Polo (c. 1269-99), and Odoric of Pordenone (1320s) attempt to rationalize the assumptions regarding a kingdom of Prester John as fantastical extrapolations of minor Eastern truths.

Even when these writers undercut some of the splendor of John’s kingdom, they keep him alive figuratively and literally. To ally Prester John with the Mongols may seem like a threat to the legend’s persistence, but in fact these travelers were updating the legend of Prester John by integrating John into the genealogy of an Eastern people foremost in the minds of Western leaders since the mid-thirteenth century. Even as some writers describe the legend as an exaggeration, their authority is restricted by the fact that none of these travelers claimed to have met the enigmatic figure.
Tartar Relation [Hystoria Tartarorum] Brewer (p. 277) relates that the Tartar Relation, composed by a man who signed his name "C. de Bridia," "is simply a copy of the story John de Plano Carpini relates about how Ihe army of Prester John repulsed the Mongols by setting up images of men and blowing fire through them."

Other scholars disagree about whether or not C. de Bridia, who describes himself as "least of the Franciscans," was sent by Pope Innocent IV on the missionary trip with Carpini to visit Batu Khan and Güyük Khan.

See George D. Painter, ed. and trans., in R.A. Skelton, Thomas E. Marston and George D. Painter, eds., The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation (London, 1965), pp. 68-71.

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