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

Introduction: The Letter

For a more developed account of the legend's origins please see the Introduction to Path Two.

The Prester John legend is known primarily through a letter, apparently penned by the Prester himself, which began to circulate in the mid-twelfth century, at the zenith of the crusading impulse. This letter, the primary artifact of the legend, quickly generated attention across Europe and survives in some 300 manuscripts in ten-plus languages. In it, Prester John describes himself as a Christian sovereign ruling authoritatively over an East beyond the reach of Dar al-Islam. As the ruler over the medieval “three Indias” John acts as living proof that nothing can escape Christian domestication, however unfamiliar the objects and landscape of the East may appear.

The popularity of the Letter was due, in part to how it linked the impulse to explore a global landscape with a desire for this landscape to be revealed as a continuation of, rather than a departure from, the known—as already Christian. But as central as the Letter of Prester John was to the development of a legend that survived for the next five centuries, it cannot fully account for the belief that such a kingdom came to inspire.

As this digital project shows, the Letter of Prester John grew into a legend upon which generations of writers and adventurers participated. As the physical location of John’s kingdom was re-imagined in order to sustain the belief that this kingdom might actually exist, Prester John became something of a nomad.

Rather than another political hoax faded from historical memory, Prester John’s kingdom became a historical destination, a place that merchants and missionaries, cartographers and romancers, could imagine and re-imagine the horizons of Christian possibility.

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