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• 1 media/Screen Shot 2021-07-18 at 9.10.06 PM.png 2015-06-18T14:53:16-07:00 Il Guerrin Meschino 17 image_header 2024-02-17T18:39:59-08:00 Il Libro del Meschino di Durazzo (written c. 1409; published 1473)
  
  Written in Florence by Andrea da Barberino in eight chapters, Guerino Il Meschino (Guerin the Wretched) was one of several of Barberino's compositions written in the early fifteenth-century that commented on early medieval themes.
  
  Here the author offers a narrative of global travel that draws on the popular imaginiative travel literature of the late fourteenth century. While Barberino was known to build on French sources for his Italian narratives, this romance appears to have no basis in earlier French narrative.
  
  Instead, like the imaginitive travel narratives it bears resemblence to, Barberino draws on a variety of sources ranging from the Alexander Romance to Dante to Ptolemy.  Insofar as he makes his title character a descendent of the Carolingian dynasty, this narrative can, however, be loosely classified as part of the "Matter of France."
  
  
  
  First circulating in manuscript and then printed in Padua in 1473, Meschino details the journey of a young man in the imperial court of Constantinople who wandered the ninth-century world, all the way to the kingdom of Prester John, seeking information about his parents. This search for his family is also understood as a search for his identity as a warrior, thus bearing on the chivalric themes so popular of this era of romance. 
  
  The prose romance draws much on the Mandevillian Style of travel lore in which a character follows a somewhat versimilar travel route through the Holy Land before arriving in India at the kingdom of Prester John. Upon discovering Prester John and his kingdom, the reader is treated to an extensive description of the Prester's opulent palace. After a battle, Guerino is offered half of India by the Prester himself.
  
  Following his encounter with Prester John, Guerino journeys back westeward through Rome and Spain before finally finding his parents, here described as the King and Queen of Durazzo, perhaps a nod to erstwhile King of Naples, Jerusalem, and Hungrary Charles of Durazzo (1345-1386).  
  
  Olschki (p. 96) describes the text as "the most popular volume of fictional geography," a popular genre of the late-middle ages. Barberino's text influenced Dati's The Great Magnificence of Prester John (ca. 1499). 
  
  Rogers contextualizes: 

  A Near Easterner who journeyed to the Farther East and subsequently visited Pope Eugenius II (reigned 824 to 827) provides the subject of an Italian story, Guerino il Meschino, which has retained its popular appeal down the centuries and was well known to Dati. 

  
  Allaire has analyzed the text's portrayal of Muslims. Like the St. Thomas legends, Guerrino Il Meschino portrays a floating coffin. 
  
  Guerrino Il Meschino was made into a film in 1950. 

• 1 media/new_presterjohnlogo.jpg 2015-05-21T12:04:14-07:00 Path Three : 1311-1460 AD 14 image_header 2021-09-08T10:19:26-07:00 From Ethiopian Embassy to Europe through the Age of Exploration​
  
  As travel to the Mongol Empire subsumed Prester John within a different cultural history, those invested in the legend developed strategies to assure European audiences that John need not be precisely known in order to exist (and to matter). Since its advent, the efficacy of the legend depended, at least partially, on the unknowability of the Eastern geographies over which John claimed to rule. However, once increased travel began to reveal a less exotic “India” than the legend’s adherents had anticipated, the legend risked becoming outmoded by the comparatively accurate historical reports of travelers returning from these lands.
  
  However, even as the Letter’s promises remained undiscovered, many refused to relinquish faith in the legend: the messianic comforts of a future delivered of Western turmoil (lack of stable leadership, fear of Muslim ascendency) had taken hold of too many Europeans. In order to combat the sober accounts of travelers who affirmed the defeat of Prester John, the physical location of John’s kingdom was constantly (and necessarily) re-imagined in order to sustain the belief that this kingdom was alive and well, despite the failures by those who sought it.
  
  Some ten years after Marco Polo returned to the West, another Prester John letter surfaces, allegedly sent by John to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, signaling a new chapter in the legend of Prester John. As with the integration of Prester John into the cultural fabric of the Mongols, this new wave of Prester John lore tied the king to a new group of "others" who recently entered into the European consciousness: Ethiopian Christians.
  
  
  Just as thirteenth-century writers integrated the legend of Prester John into their developing understanding of the Mongols on the Steppe, a number of fourteenth-century travelers relocated John’s kingdom to Ethiopia/Abyssinia, or “Middle India.” 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. This time, rather than a defeated underling of Chinggis Khan​, Prester John became a luxuriously wealthy Christian king.
  
  Friar Jordanus of Séverac (c. 1320) writes of a dragon-filled kingdom of Prester John in Ethiopia; in the mid fourteenth century, The Book of the Knowledge of All the Kingdoms, Lands, and Lordships That Are in the World claimed that Prester John was the patriarch of Nubia and Abyssinia; Henry the Navigator commissioned explorations of Africa were rooted in the hope of an Ethiopian Prester John.
  
  ​Thus, during the fourteenth century,  writers connected this meeting with the kingdom of Prester John and re-ignited the theory of an Ethiopian John, an identification that would continue through Portugal’s sea explorations.
   

  By the fifteenth century, this identification largely remains in place, with a few notable exceptions. In 1409, Andrea da Barberino pens his Guerrino il Meschino, “a fantastic and confused description of the countries and wonders of Tartary, India, and other regions of Asia and Africa” (Olschki, 96).