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

Kerait

The Keraits were one of the five dominant Mongol khanates during the twelfth century. They converted to Nestorian Christianity in the early 11th century, which helped spawn ideas about Prester John figure.

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Prester John and 'Nestorianism' 19 image_header 2024-02-26T19:08:17-08:00
There are three texts predating the "Letter" that mention a distant priest king called John. They are listed below. All three express that this figure was a so-called Nestorian Christian, which would have counted as a heretic in the Catholic West.

Nestorianism referred to the belief, popularized by Patriarch Nestorius, that Christ was of two natures: both human and divine. This belief was condemned as heresy by the European Catholic Church at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, two decades after being condemned at the Council of Ephesus by the Byzantine Church in 431. These condemnations all but ended the influence of Nestorianism in the European west.

By the time of Prester John's advent in the 12th century, both Nestorianism and its opposite, monophysitism (which declared that Christ was of a single divine nature), had long been considered heretical by the Catholic Church, though it must be said that the Catholic position in which Christ's human nature was "absorbed into" his divine could be understood as uncannily similar (or only slightly semantically differentiable) from Nestorianism.

Although the Letter itself does not mention John's Nestorianism explicitly, this denominational adherence became part of the lore surrounding John and his kingdom within the century.

While the influence of Nestorianism in Europe was all but nonexistent by the advent of the Prester John legend, its influence was much more significant in more eastern locales. As early as 635, Nestorian A-lo-pen arrives in China to preach. Although by 1000, the T’ang Dynasty effectively destroyed all of the Nestorian churches in China, its influence grew in Mongolia, Turkestan, and other areas of the Steppe.

According to Bar Hebreaus, an early influence on the early legend, the Mongol tribe of Keraits (conflated with the army of Prester John by Otto of Freising) were baptized into Nestorian faith and remained Nestorians from the eleventh century through the thirteenth.

Furthermore, the historically accurate association of Nestorianism with St. Thomas (and India) naturally led many of those invested in the legend to project Prester John's kingdom somewhere in India (a name that at the time of course encompassed basically everything from China to Ethiopia). The following map depicts the locations of Nestorian churches in the Middle Ages:
- Anonymous - On the Arrival of the Partriarch of the Indians to Rome (1122)
- Odo of Rheims - Letter to "Count Thomas" (1122)
- Otto of Freising - History of the Two Cities (1143)
André Longjumeau André de Longjumeau was a Dominican missionary who led two missions to Güyük Khan in the mid-thirteenth century. His reports are a mixture of fact and fiction-- though William of Rubruck claimed that everything he heard from André de Longjumeau regarding the east was true.

André recorded his journey, which survives only in fragments collected by Joinville's Life of Saint Louis. There André describes a meeting with a “David,” a Kerait chieftain, whom he concludes has allied with a Mongol general in order to attack Muslims in Syria. For more on this journey, see Silverberg (pp. 105-39).

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Mongol Tribes