This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

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

Peter Heylyn

Peter Heylyn (1599-1662) was a prolific English Anglican, Royalist ecclesiastic and academic who wrote prolifically on politics, theology, and geography, and was an outspoken critic of Puritanism. He was a fellow and lecturer at Magdalen College of Oxford.

His Cosmographie serves in part to diminish the role of Prester John.

This page has tags:

This page is referenced by:

De Emendatione Temporum Written by Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) and published in 1583, De Emendatione Temporum ("Of the Correction of Times") is described by Elizabeth Ott of the Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog as an attempt to "formalize the science of chronology," drawing on "Persian, Arab, Greek, Roman, and other ancient traditions, identifying and correcting the errors of his predecessors to synchronize various cultures’ accounts of history."

Under these ambitious auspices, Scaliger authors an influential account of the Prester John legend. Attempting to reconcile the earlier theories of an Asian Prester John with the more contemporary theories of Prester John as Ethiopian negus, Scaliger proposes that Prester John led an exiled group of Mongols in Ethiopia. This group, Scaliger proposes, were sent to Africa in defeat at the hands of Ghengis Khan.

As edited in Brewer (p. 225):
In our recollection, there were in Italy certain churches of the Christian Ethiopians, who they call Abassins or Abissins... Indeed, by the navigations of the Portuguese, and by the splendid book of the journey of the Portuguese priest Francisco Alvarez, who penetrated into the inmost Ethiopia, one may learn many things about those men and their rites. Once, all Africa from the Nile's final mouth, to the Gaditan straits [i.e. the Straits of Gibraltar], and likewise from the Tyrrhenian Sea to beyond the Equinox towards the south, was full of Christian churches and cities, and this great tract of lands was obedient to the one Bishop of Alexandria. But if there are any churches remaining today in those parts, they recognise that patriarch alone, like these Ethiopians, being discussed now, and whom the lonely deserts and difficult routes defend from the general wasteland of Africa... Before the arrival of the Portuguese in Ethiopia, the name of the Ethiopian Christians alone was scarcely known to us, and their falsely named emperor Prestegiani; since that name does not belong to he who reigned in Ethiopia, but he who reigned in Asia three hundred years previously, a long way distant... they falsely call him Prestegiani, and [to say] that this Ethiopian is the same as that Asian man out of the itinerary of Paul the Venetian [i.e. Marco Polo] because they are both Christian is utter nonsense. It is indeed correct that three hundred years previously, certain Ethiopian kings ruled far and wide in Asia, especially in Drangiana, at the ends of Susa, and in India, until the emperors of the Tartars expelled them from all of Asia, and they were the first ones defeated, so they say, by Chingis, King of the Tartars, having killed their emperor Uncam... all those Ethiopians who had been thrown out of the kingdom of the Mongols and Chinese and were driven all the way to furthest Africa.

As Brewer (p. 225) mentions, Scaliger's theory was challenged by Peter Heylyn, who, in his Cosmographie (1652), writes that such a theory was "found in no record but in Scaliger's head." Others texts, such as Samuel Purchas' Purchas His Pilgrimes (1613) and Athanasius Kircher's China Illustrata (1667).
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.
Explore “New, Plaine, & Exact Mapp of Africa”