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

Matteo Salvadore

Matteo Salvadore, “The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe: 1306-1458.” Journal of World History 21 (2010): 593-627.

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Carignano Portolan Map
Carignano Portolan Map (1305-1327)

Carignano was known primarily as a cartographer and geographer, but he also wrote a now-lost treatise on Ethiopia based on an alleged meeting in Genoa with the Ethiopian embassy that traveled to Europe in 1306.

A summary of the long-lost commentary to the map can be found in Jacopo Filippo Foresti’s Supplementum Chronicarum.

Carignano's Portolan Map, based in part from the information he gleaned from the Ethiopian embassy, is the first known document to correctly situate the "black Christians" of Abyssinia/Ethiopia between the Blue and White Nile. According to Salvadore, "his was the first map to abandon the copycat style of mapmaking typical of medieval Europe, which simply proposed again and again geographical knowledge that originated in antiquity" (p. 602).

On the map, Carignano describes the land of Prester John thusly (165):
"Prester John is set over that people [Ethiopians] as patriarch; and he says that under him are 127 archbishoprics, each of which has 20 bishops. Those who are to be reborn they baptize in the Roman manner…it is said that their emperor is most Christian, to whom 74 kings and almost innumerable princes pay allegiance, except those kings who observe the laws of Mahomet but submit to the emperor in other things."

Salvadore (p. 3) elegantly captures the significance of the alleged visit that inspired the the map and and on the map itself as a bellwether inaugrating the tropes that come to dominate European discourse over the ensuing three centuries on the potential of a European-African alliance:
[T]here can be no type of conclusive interpretation of the Ethiopian transit through Genoa; yet, it remains extremely significant because it is the first recorded case of an Ethiopian visit to Europe and, if accepted as an embassy, also the first recorded African embasssy to a European sovereign. The few toponyms Carignano included on this map, along with the alleged commentary, documented not only the first timid Ethiopian steps into Europe but also the equally timid European attempts to move past a variety of myths and misconceptions of anicent and medieval derivation as to the existence, identity, and location of Christian communities beyond the Middle East. More generally, the visit adumbrates the emergence of an encounter between the Kingdom of Ethiopia an dvarious polities in Western Mediterranean Europe. It presents tropes that will appear in similar guises time and time again in the ensuing centuries: Ethiopian embassies seeking Christian allies, pious Ethiopian monks defying the odds of early modern travel to find salvation and knowledge at the heart of Western Christendom, European traders seeking commercial opportunities, and lay and ordained intellectuals, chroniclers, and mapmakeres grappling with the notion of a country to be found in the Indies and populated by black Christians.

From Beckingham (199):
"This map, which was in Florence, was destroyed during World War II, but the lower edge, where Ethiopia would have been shown, had already been severely mutilated so that the reproductions published before its disappearance can tell us little that is relevant to the embassy. It was signed Johannes presbyler rector sancti Marci de portu Janue me fecit. Fischer, who first published the map, accepted the identification of Johannes presbyter with Giovanni da Carignano, but contended that the embassy came from Persia and must have been responsible for some information about the western part of the Ilkhanid empire which the map provides.”
From Beckingham (209):
“At least since an Ethiopian embassy had come to Avignon during the papacy of Clement V (1305-14) the ruler of Ethiopia had sometimes been identified with Prester John, perhaps for the first time in the map of Giovanni da Carignano, which was destroyed during World War II. Giovanni was the priest of the harbour church of San Marco at Genoa and had himself met the envoys on their way back to Ethiopia.”
Letter of Prester John to Emperor Charles IV
Letter of Prester John to Emperor Charles IV (c. 1370)

This letter, apparently produced in the same general era as the alleged 1306 Ethiopian embassy to Europe, exhorts the Holy Roman emperor to join the Ethiopian king in a crusade against Islam. Although it deviates from the standard Letter of Prester John, it is, like its predecessor, almost certainly a forgery.

Published by Leone del Prete in 1857, the Italian text, the manuscript of which is still housed in Florence, has been used as indirect evidence of the historicity of that 1306 embassy. Within the letter, the author makes reference to "other times we sent you an embassy and we did not receive an answer," which scholars have linked to the 1306 embassy. The letter's author signs the text "Re Voddomaradeg figliulo del ecclentissimo Re d'Etiopia, di Saionio, di Tobbia, di Nubbia, di terra di Bettesi e di Moritoro, e Preste Gian Re dell'India maggiore e minore."

Salvadore (pp. 602-3) describes the context surrounding the anonymous letter:
“The only other source relevant for this first Ethiopian expedition to Italy is a letter allegedly sent by Prester John to Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV (1316-1378). The letter was certainly a European forgery; nevertheless, it indirectly confirms that the Ethiopian emperor Wedem Ra’ad, known in Renaissance Europe as the author, signed it as ‘King Voddomaradeg, son of the most excellent King of Ethiopia.’ Voddomaradeg represents quite a syllabic stretch from Wedem Ra’ad, but it confirms that the emperor had made himself known in Europe, most likely through the mission that reached Avignon via Rome and Genoa. What persuaded Wedem Ra’ad to send representatives to Europe? Had he been inspired by the Portuguese reconquista that had been completed in 1249 and whose echoes had reached Jerusalem and ultimately the Ethiopian Highlands? The encounter seems to be the first of a series of attempts that Ethiopian rulers made to establish formal contact with European elites on the basis of a common Christian identity. The quest for distant allies was not an Ethiopian fantasy, but rather the consequence of a desire that was reciprocated on the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea."

Read the Italian edition of the letter.

See also Kaplan, 51-62.
1306 Ethiopian Embassy In 1306, a group of Ethiopian Christians visited Pope Clement V at Avignon. According to later texts which recount the meeting, the Ethiopian ambassadors desired that their European brethren return to the true doctrine of the Christian Church.

Christianity in Ethiopia.

Although no contemporary records survive (and Krebs has cast doubt on the entire story), the event was recorded in later texts, including Giacomo Filippo Foresti da Bergamo's Supplementum Chronicarum (1483), along with texts by Chasseneux (1546), Godinho (1615), and Le Mire (1619). These later writers connected this meeting with the kingdom of Prester John, reigniting the theory of an Ethiopian John, an identification that would continue through Portugal’s sea explorations.

For more on the story of this cultural confluence, see Beckingham. Additionally, Salvadore (604-6) writes of Ethiopian Christian envoys who arrive in Italy in 1402.