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

Nicolas Visscher

His 1652 map is contained in Peter Heylin's Cosmographie.

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Peter Heylyn's Cosmographie Cosmographie in foure Bookes Contayning the Chrographie & Historie of the whole World and all the Principall Kingdomes, Provinces, Seas, and Isles, Thereof (1652)

Published in 1652, Peter Heylyn's Cosmographie presents readers with a universal geography in four books, one of which touches on the Prester John legend. His work was based on classical authors like Ptolemy and Pliny but also more contemporary English geographical work like that of George Abbot. The text went through several editions, with the sixth edition (1682) considered, according to Brooks (p. 205) as "highly regarded." The Cosmography was considered a standard work of European geogaphy into the eighteenth century.

Heylyn's text contains maps, including one of Prester John's empire by Dutch cartogropher Nicolas Visscher.

Most significantly, Cosmographie doubts Prester John's dual function as priest and king, which may not be surprising given the anti-Catholic sentiments of its author. Brewer (p. 239) also notes that Heylyn dismisses a circulating notion (proposed by Joseph Scaliger) that Ethiopians originally descended from Asia. Heylyn instead offers an account of an Asian Prester John and reasons that the Portuguese identification of John with Ethiopia resulted merely from linguistic misunderstanding.

Brooks (p. 167-8) excerpts Heylyn's description of the nature of Prester John's name and title:
And yet I more incline to those, who finding that the word Prestegan signifieth an Apostle, in the Persian tongue, and Prestigani, and Apostolical man: do thereupon inferr that the title of Padescha Prestigiani, and Apostolick King, was given unto him for the Orthodoxie of his belief, which not being understood by some, instead of Preste-gian, they have made Priest-John, in Latine Presbyter Johannes; as by a like mistake, one Pregent (or Prægian as the French pronounce it) commander of some Gallies under Lewis the 12, was by the English of those times called Prior John.
New, Plaine, & Exact Mapp of Africa
Peter Heylyn's 1652 Cosmographie included a world map by Nicolas Visscher that depicted the kingdom of Prester John. Despite the fact that the Dutch cartographer came from a family of mapmakers possessed of the most contemporary cartographic information, Visscher relied heavily on classical and biblical traditions in his mapmaking, which can be see in his depiction of Prester John's kingdom.

That is not to say that his map of Africa is completely inaccurate. The shape of Africa was one of the most accurate for its time and the tropics and equator were fixed precisely. Along the border of the map, Visscher depicted various African rulers, including Prester John, depicted as a youngish crowned black man and titled "King of Abissines." As Brooks notes (p. 209), the ornamentation of Prester John is compoaratively more European than that of the other African kings depicted on the map.

Prester John's Abyssinia takes up roughly a full third of Africa, hearkening back to the tradiition established by Fra Mauro in his mappaemundi.

From Brooks (p. 209):
It is also within the imagined boundaries of the kingdom of Prester John that Visscher included quite a vareity of mythical and legendary items beleived by late medieval and early modern Europeans to exist in Africa. Visscher included a "Zair Lake" from which the Congo and Nile Rivers supposedly emanated, which was a body of water that Visscher claimed was "where ye Tritons and Mermaids are said to be."

The southern borders of the laand of Prester John are the location of the Mountains of the Moon, also believed by Europeans to be the source of the Nile River.
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