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

Niayesh

Ladan Niayesh, "Prester John Writes Back: The Legend and Its Early Modern Reworkings." In A Knight’s Legacy: Mandeville and Mandevillian Lore in Early Modern Europe. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012. 155-172

This page is referenced by:

The Two Cities, A Chronicle of Universal History De Duabus Civitatibus (1157-1158)

Inspired by civil unrest in Germany and written shortly after the fall of Edessa in 1143, Otto of Freising's Historia de duabus civitatibus has come to be known for providing an important early source on the figure of Prester John.

Oddly enough, this vital information is nothing more than an a recorded anecdote from 1145 that tells of a colleague of Otto's called Hugh of Jabala, a bishop from Lebanon, who was relaying news of a promising Nestorian Christian prince, Iohannes. This news as given in the presence of Pope Eugenius III at Viterbo.

According to Otto, widely reputed to be a trustworthy historian, this Iohannes, hailing from the distant East of the Magi, had recently conquered Persia and headed West to assist crusaders in their defense of the Holy Land. Unfortunately, Otto relates, a flooded Tigris River prevented him from aiding his Latin Christian brethren. As summarized by Slessarev (27-28):
He [i.e. Hugh] related also that not many years before a certain John, a king and priest who dwells beyond Persia and Armenia in the uttermost East and, with all his people, is a Christian but a Nestorian, made war on the brother kings of Persians and Medes, called Samiardi, and stormed Ekbatana (the seat of their kingdom).

When the aforesaid kings met him with an army composed of Persians, Medes and Assyrians a battle ensued which lasted for three days, since both parties were willing to die rather than turn in flight. Prester John, for so they are accustomed to call him... emerged victorious.

He said that after this victory the aforesaid John moved his army to the aid of the Church in Jerusalem. But that when he had reached the river Tigris and was unable to transport his army across that river by any evidence he turned towards the north... tarried there for several years... [and] was forced to return home.”

In analyzing the anecdote that arguably sparked the Prester John fever across Europe, Niayesh (p. 157) notes the structural "ambivalence" of Hugh's account, noting that his story was "caught half-way between the pagan past of classical authorities and the present of Christian Crusaders" insofar as Prester John is "made to fight the long extinct nations of the Medes and Assyrians, rather than directly facing contemporary 'Saracens.'

Even the somewhat contemporaneous historical details do not, in actuality, herald a Christian savior of western Europe. Although this rumor spawned the centuries-long belief in an Eastern potentate capable of uniting Christendom, the initial account of an Eastern anti-Islamic leader was later understood to refer to the deeds of the Qara Khitai, a nomadic Chinese tribe descending from Manchuria. Significantly, this battle took place in Samarkand, not Ecbatana, as Hugh reports.

Nevertheless, despite historical mistranslation and Iohannes's failure to reach even Byzantium, this rumor helped set in motion, for many Europeans, a belated recognition of the world beyond the Tigris.

Brewer edits and translates the relevant passages of the chronicle (pp. 43-45).
Path Five: 1521-1699 AD Prester John and European Modernity

This period of the legend begins with the earnest (and arguably successful) search by a Portuguese Embassy in 1520 to locate Prester John in Ethiopia, features minor appearances in literary texts (many of which reflect the neo-Chivalric revival of the late 1580s through the 1590s), and terminates in an age of skepticism about the legend that closes the 18th century.

During this era, Prester John was mainly identified with Africa-- particularly Ethiopia. Through the sixteenth century, this identification became common for most European world maps. On a 1540 map by Munster, for example, the capital city of the kingdom of Prester John is situated in "Hamarich" (may be present day Hamar).

As Niayesh argues (p. 164), here we see a transformation of the figure of Prester John from belated European savior "into the prototype of the eastern ruler who is to be overcome and no longer sought after as an ally." While Niayesh's comment accurately describes the developments of some of the writing on Prester John (especially in fiction), his kingdom remained for others still a real physical target (or at least a useful rhetorical ally).

Given Portugal's aggressive missions to Africa in general and Ethiopia in particular, the era is dominated by Portuguese thought and writing, but other European countries were still using the figure of Prester John as a means of negotiating their own power and understanding of the world. Several English writers, including George Abbot, found a spiritual ally in Prester John by emphasizing the imaginary rulers resistance to Catholicism. Others, such as Edward Webbe, continued to promote the same story that had been told since Mandeville.

It can be argued that this era ended in the year 1633, when Ethiopia closes its borders to Europeans after the expulsions of the Jesuits by Emperor Fasilides, yet, as Brewer (p. 273) points out, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of texts from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries that contain some comment associating Prester John with Ethiopia.

While European travel to Ethiopia may have ended in the first half of the seventeenth century, the texts and tales that circulated for the rest of the century almost entirely reflect the narratives that first established this era, most due to Portuguese travel.
The Book of John Mandeville
The Book of John Mandeville (c. 1356-1360)

Compiled in the mid-fourteenth century, the notorious Book of John Mandeville had a lasting effect on European understanding of world geography well into the eighteenth century.

This medieval bestseller was translated into English, Latin, Spanish, German Dutch, Bohemian, Danish, and Gaelic. The oldest surviving copy, written in an Anglicized French, is dated to 1371. As with the Letter of Prester John, the Book of John Mandeville resists easy generic classification, with readers describing the text with terms including 'livre', 'geste', 'romant', 'tractatus', 'itenerarium', 'voiage' and 'trauayle' (Niayesh, 160).

Written from the persona of an almost certainly fictional English knight, "Mandeville" relates a highly imaginative journey from England to the gates of the Earthly Paradise and back (for "Mandeville" understood the world as round). Round as Mandeville's world was, the spiritual and geographical "center" remained in Jerusalem, often quipped to be the "navel" of the world during the European Middle Ages. As Rosemary Tzanaki (p.11) writes, The Book of John Mandeville depicts a "religious geography" with Jerusalem at its center, "stressing the unity of this world through its very diversity."

In his journey to the locales furthest away from Jerusalem, approaching that Earthly Paradise from which "Mandeville" finds himself barred, he journeys through Pantaxore, his name for the realm of Prester John. Referencing the theory of the antipodes, "Mandeville" comments that this land of Pantaxore lies "foot agaynst foot to Englonde."

Mandeville's version of the Prester John legend integrates the European knowledge of the Mongol Empire into the story of Prester John, even inventing a ceremony in which Prester John's daughter is ceremoniusly wed to the "grete Chane" and vice versa.

In the early seventeenth century, Samuel Purchas, an armchair traveler himself, declared Mandeville "the greatest Asian traveler that ever the world had" (qtd. in Silverberg, p. 148). The renowned British geographer Richard Hakluyt, a contemporary of Purchas, referred to Mandeville in his Principall Navigations as "eruditum et insignem Authorem" [erudite and distinguished author] (Brooks, p. 88).

Although a highly dubious travel tale, the influence of Mandeville's geographical lore on European cultural understanding of the wider world is immense: Niayesh, referencing the text's immense influence on later travelers, dubs the Mandeville character as the "knight of transmission" (155). Above all, this text remained impactful for its skillful weaving together of earlier travel narratives and its contention of a global Christendom.

Mandeville casts Prester John as the famed figurehead of an unknowable realm through which the belief he clearly inspired may persist. The book clearly cribs from earlier travel narratives and encyclopedias--including the writings of Vincent of Beauvais, John of Plano Carpini, Ascelin of Lombardia, William of Rubruck, Marco Polo, and Odoric of Pordenone-- but often expands on those accounts through a clear desire to entertain. Though the literary value of Mandeville’s text itself has been debated, its influence on later medieval literary texts cannot be denied.

Mandeville returns Prester John to his former glory, as detailed by Heng (p. 134):
An influential travel romance like Mandeville’s Travels, which strategically prefers to emphasize the older, nostalgically legendary aura of Prester John, also shrewdly prefers to underemphasize the Nestorian character of the Christianity anchored into place by the localization of the Prester John story in preceding thirteenth- and fourteenth-century historical accounts. While allowing for some variation of doctrine and practice from the Latin Church, in Prester John’s empire, the Travels vigorously underscores the ultimately universal principles of Christianity shared in common with John’s people—the most important commonalities of faith and devotion— and celebrates the piety and virtue of John’s folk: “This emperor Prester John is a Christian man, and the most part of his land also, if all be it so that they have not all the articles of our belief so clearly as we have. Nonetheless they believe in God, Father and Son and Holy Ghost; and full devout men they are and true each one to the other, and there is neither with them fraud nor guile.
By emphasizing the devout Christianity of Prester John’s people, and winking at their Nestorian difference, then, the Travels is able to present John’s empire, in its Christian ideality, as a heterotopian mirror for Europe: a mirror in which Europe might see an exotic version of itself, dressed up as a successful Christian empire that happens to be located elsewhere. Simultaneously John’s domain is also conspicuously partnered with the Khan’s imperial domain in such a way as to suggest that John’s realm functions as a kind of Christian threshold to the Khanate, a counterpart-in-empire that mimics the Great Khan’s vast imperial enterprise" (281).
The history of the Mandeville text is complex and, for many, there is no one preferred edition. The most complete edition probably remains Malcolm Letts’ edition and translation of the Egerton text.

For a succinct summary of the publication history of the Travels, see the first footnote in Moseley.

For more on the text, see Kohanski and Benson’s introduction to the TEAMS edition, available here.

Read the Middle English text online.
Read a modernized translation online.
Orlando Furioso
In Orlando Furioso, first printed in Ferrara in 1516, Ariosto delves into the Matter of France, updating the stories of Charlemagne and his paladins at war with the Saracens with more worldly and whimsical considerations, include a foray to an Ethiopia drawn from the tales of Prester John. In other words, though the text cites as its source the twelfth-century "Song of Roland," Furioso updates the story to suit the imaginiative interests of the time and to satisfy his patron Ippolito Este, Duke of Ferrara. The text has been cited as an influence on the work of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Milton, among other canonical early modern writers.

Orlando Furioso features an Ethiopian priest-king called Senapo/Senapus (a corrupted translation of Abdes-Salib, the Arabic title for the Ethiopian king) who rules over an immensely wealthy kingdom and controls the flow of the Nile River—the very river that dashed crusader hopes during the Fifth Crusade.

Its story of the English Knight Astolfo (a potential avatar of Mandeville, according to Niayesh) and his journey on a hippogriff across North Africa from west to east and thence to Ethiopia appeared at the appropriate moment to sustain interest in this imaginary land. In Canto XXXIII, Astolfo rescues Senapo, who has been rendered blind after trying to discover the Earthly Paradise by seeking out the source of the Nile River.

Ariosto’s is a highly satirical text, his inclusion of the legend shows how, even in the sixteenth century, writers were still attempting to create a plausible backstory to unite the imaginative interest in the legend with a history from which he may have emerged.

Interestingly, the character of Senapo reemerges in Gerusalemme Liberata, a 1581 epic of the Crusades credited to Torquato Tasso.

An excerpt from the William Stewart Rose translation of the expanded version, first published in 1532, follows:
In Aethiopia’s realm Senapus reigns,
Whose sceptre is the cross; of cities brave,
Of men, of gold possest, and broad domains,
Which the Red Sea’s extremest waters lave.
A faith well nigh like ours that king maintains,
Which man from his primaeval doom may save.
Here, save I err in what their rites require,
The swarthy people are baptized with fire.
Ariosto offers a description of the castle and explains the situation:
The soldan, king of the Egyptian land,
Pays tribute to this sovereign, as his head,
They say, since having Nile at his command
He may divert the stream to other bed.
Hence, with its district upon either hand,
Forthwith might Cairo lack its daily bread.
Senapus him his Nubian tribes proclaim;
We Priest and Prester John the sovereign name.

Rogers (pp. 106-107), on Senapo and his connection to Prester John:
[The story's] astonishing accuracy in detail can only be explained by the supposition of meticulous study on the part of its author. For Astolfo’s route and for the name ‘Senapo,’ Ariosto followed a fourteenth-century Genoese tradition. Senapo, as such competent scholars as Cerulli and Crawford affirm, is a deformation of the regnal name of an emperor whose reign extended from 1314 to 1344: ‘Amda Seyon I. His regnal name of Gabra Masqal (in Arabic ‘Abd al-salib) meant ‘slave of the cross.’ The Arabic version appeared as ‘Senap’ on the Angelino Dulcert world map of 1339. Years after publication of Ariosto’s poem, Tasso in the Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) reintroduced Senapo, and Alexander Cunningham Robertson thus presented him to English readers:

Senapo once filled Ethiopia’s throne,
And still, perhaps, endures his prosperous reign:
This potentate the laws of Mary’s Son
Observes, and these observe the swarthy men
He rules…

E-text at Sacred Texts.
Tom a Lincoln Two texts from the early seventeenth century use the title and figure called Tom a Lincoln. The first, The Most Pleasant History of Tom a Lincoln, an unremarkable chivalric romance written by Richard Johnson around 1607, relates the adventures of Tom and his fellow Knights of the Round Table. The second, a shorter dramatized version tentatively attributed to Thomas Heywood and written somewhat later than the prose romance is simply called Tom a Lincoln and follows much of the same basic romance plot. Interestingly, both texts feature a scene with Prester John. In the play, Tom and his fellow knights reach the realm of Prester John. After Tom defeats a dragon, Prester John refuses to allow his daughter Anglitora to marry Tom, and the two abscond together, leaving John and his grieving queen Bellamy to commit suicide.

A Niayesh (p. 55) points out, in the play Prester John has become emptied of any of the significations that marked his identity for the previous five centuries:
Nothing in the play lends any specificity to his realm, where the character and his daughter simply appear as types of the angry father and disobedient daughter. No reference is made here to Prester John's being a Christian; in fact, he actually swears by 'the gods' (l. 2529) like a true pagan. The geographical whereabouts of his land are in no way detailed, leaving us only to infer that he is neither Indian... nor Ethiopian.
Brewer (p. 233) includes an excerpt from a 1631 prose edition of Tom a Lincoln, published in London.

Read the full prose version at the Camelot Project.
Tamburlaine Written in 1598 or 1599, Part Two of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine features a brief mention of Prester John (1.3.186-90):
And I have march'd along the River Nile,
To Machda, where the mighty Christian Priest
Cal'd John the great, sits in a milk-white robe.
Whose triple Myter did I take by force,
And made him sweare obedience to my crowne.
As Niayesh (p. 164) points out, these lines, spoken by Tamburlaine's chief lieutenant Techelles, depict Prester John not as a savior to seek out but as an African sovereign to vanquish.
Prester John and the Alexander Legends Several of the marvels described in the Letter of Prester John can be traced back to the Alexander Legends, including the 10 enclosed tribes of Jews, the Gymonosophists, the figures of Gog and Magog, and, in later versions of the Letter, the Trees of the Sun and Moon.

As Niayesh points out (p. 162), Prester John seems to share common traits with the Alexander Legend's Indian King Porus.
English Letter of Prester John Published in Antwerp in 1520, this printed version of the Letter represents the first truly English language version. As Niayesh (p.159), notes, the English version is dated internally as "[w]ritten in oure holy pallays in the byrth of my selfe .v. hodred and seuen."

Niayesh continues:
Here, Prester John shares his Methuselah-like longevity, not just with the biblical patriarchs but also with the naked and promiscuous New World cannibals who 'lyue comonly .iii.C. yere & more as w sykenesse they dye nat' (sig. A2v). Meanwhile the Amazons inhabiting the land of 'Feminie' under his dominion (sig. C3r) are hardly more feminine than the female Georgian fighters of the 'eyght [Christian] nacyon' who 'bere harneyse lyke the men and ... haue also beardes as ye men' (sig. C3r). As for the harrowing reports of New World cannibalism ('the man etethe his wyfe his chylderne / as we also haue seen' (sig. A2v), they find an echo which is distant both in space and in time through the ferocious hosts of Gog and Magog who turn allelophagous and devour each other whenever Prester John is left without enemies whom he might unleash them (sig. C2v-C3r).
Historie of the Seaven Champions of Christendom Historie of the Seaven Champions of Christendom (c. 1596), now known simply as The Seven Champions of Christendom, is the first of two romances by Richard Johnson to feature the character and realm of Prester John (the other being Tom a Lincoln).

As Niayesh (p. 164) points out, here Prester John "has stopped being Prester John and is cast as the 'King if Babylon', a title recalling the 'Sowdone of Babylone'," an almost archetypal "Saracen" antagonist of early medieval romance.
Samiardi Although initially unclear, the reference to this unfamiliar "Samiardi" must refer in some distorted way to the Seljuk Sanjar whose army was defeated at Qatawan (near Samarkand) by the somewhat Nestorian Kara Khitai in 1141.

The conflation that produced "Samiardi" from Sanjar has received multiple explanations by students of the Prester John legend.

Silverberg (p. 12) points out that some manuscripts of Otto's text use "Saniardi," a plural form of Sanjar, which, given the Seljuk custom of cooperative rule among brothers, provides a somewhat plausible explanation for the mutation "Samiardi."

Niayesh (p. 157) adds, "[a]s for the mysterious name of John's kingly adversaries, the 'Samiardi', it recalls the Persian 'Smerdis', name of the murdered brother of Cambyses, son and heir to Cyrus the Great." Given that Cyrus the Great destroyed Ecbatana, reputed site of the Christian victory over a Muslim army in Hugh of Jabala's narrative, nearly 1800 years before Hugh reports the battle there, Niayesh puzzles over the way that this version of Prester John "is made to fight the long extinct nations of the Medes and Assyrians, rather than directly facing contemporary 'Saracens.' "