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

Life of St. Louis

Livre des saintes paroles et des bons faiz de nostre saint roy Looÿs (1305-1309)

Written as a biography of Louis IX during the Seventh Crusade, Jean de Joinville's Life of Saint Louis documents the culture surrounding the Crusade. Using information from André Longjumeau, Jean narrates the destruction of Prester John by the Mongols (Silverberg, 96-111). The story is similar to those recounted by the other missionaries deployed to Khanbaliq in the mid-thirteenth century.

Vitale (p. 16) summarizes Joinville’s contribution on the legend:

Joinville, who accompanied Louis IX on a Crusade in 1248-49, writes in his Chronicle some fifty years later that Andrew of Longjumeau and his brother, both Dominican priests who spoke Arabic, had been sent as emissaries to the Mongols. Andrew reported to Joinville that the Tartars (Mongols) who had been subject to Prester John had risen up and defeated him.

See also Silverberg, pp. 96-111.
Read an English translation of Joinville here.
To read Joinville in the original French see Wailly’s edition.

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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.