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

From Peter Heylyn, Cosmographie (1652)

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Introduction In a global Middle Ages, there are few individuals, fictional or historical, who have secured a more lasting impact on the way that Europeans came to know the world than Prester John. A product of cultural fantasy mixed with hope for historical change, Prester John has engaged the imagination of an increasingly diverse audience since the mid-twelfth century. Over the course of the next six hudreed years, Prester John figured centrally in Christendom’s understanding of what the distant world was like: crusading aspirations depended on his materialization; missionary undertakings in the East leveraged their chances of converting natives against a presumption of his existence, and, mercantile-minded men from Marco Polo through Christopher Columbus dreamt of the putative riches of his kingdom.

“The Peregrinations of Prester John” allows readers to experience the legend’s unfolding, piece-by-piece, as it swept up half of the world, from 1150 to 1700. The project tells the story of Prester John across the centuries during which legendary material accrued and alongside the geographies the myth touched and helped shape. One goal of this e-book is to show that Prester John cannot be confined solely to the Middle Ages or to the recesses of the “premodern.” As will become clear, the popularity of the legend actually increases steadily over the six hundred year period this project traces. Rather than a vestige of medieval superstition and belief, Prester John figures crucially in the project of European modernity.
MOVING FORWARD
While the composite map illustrates something of the sheer volume of Prester John data available as well as the legend’s global reach, it does not tell much of a story in itself. In the following section, I will break this data down in a series of focused maps organized by what I will henceforth refer to as “eras” of the legend. In the following sections, I will use these maps to help tell the global story of Prester John.

WHAT'S TO COME?

In addition to a visual/narrative history of all five eras of the Prester John legend, this space will also house an e-archive of the Letter of Prester John and its hundreds of manuscripts. This e-archive will provide transcriptions of the of Letter and its many interpolations in order to illustrate more locally how this communally-authored legend changed over time to suit the imaginations and ambitions of its readership.

Continue to Path One: 1122-1220 AD