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

Odoric of Pordenone

Born in Fruili, Italy, Odoric of Pordenone (1286-1331) was a Franciscan missionary famous for the written account of his travels to China from 1318 to 1330. Odoric spent considerable time with the Great Khan in Khanbaliq, a city that, by this point, contained an established Catholic church, thanks to John of Monte Corvino. The Travels of Odoric of Pordenone (1330) later became an important source for Mandeville's Travels.

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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.
Sandy Sea Versions of the Letter nearly all reference a "sandy sea" (also called the "dry" or "gravelly" sea), a conventional marvel mentioned in a number of classical (Pliny's Historia Naturalis and Josephus' Judean War, notably) and medieval texts. Silverberg (p. 51) avers that the Letter's version of the "sandy sea" motif can be traced to Eldad the Danite.

Although it is unclear exactly where this desert is supposed to exist (though Josephus places it in Lebanon), later travelers (including Marco Polo) identified it as the Lop Nur Desert in China.

Several texts influenced by the Letter include this detail about the sandy sea. Mandeville keeps to the language of the Letter almost exactly. Odoric of Pordenone, a Franciscan traveler who undermines the veracity of the Prester John Letter, also mentions traveling through a desert that resembles a swirling sea.

For more on the "dry sea" motif, see Lowes.