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

Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg, The Realm of Prester John. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1972.

This page is referenced by:

Letter to "Count Thomas" on a certain Miracle of St. Thomas the Apostle Domni Oddonis Abbatis S. Remigii Epistola ad Thomam comitem de quodam miraculo S. Thomae Apostoli (1122)

This letter, penned by Odo of Rheims, describes the arrival to Rome of a Byzantine retinue escorting a nameless Indian Archbishop who described to an audience including Pope Calixtus II the marvels that occur in his country through the ghostly power of St. Thomas. Odo claims to have witnessed this meeting.

From Silverberg (p. 32):
“Odo, who lived from 1118 and 1151, probably wrote the letter between 1126 and 1135. In it he tells of being present at the court of the Pope when a delegation of ambassadors form Byzantium arrived, bringing with them a certain Archbishop of India, whom Odo does not name… He declares that the ruler of the archbishop’s country had died, leaving no heir, and the archbishop had gone to Byzantium to obtain a new prince for his land from among the Byzantine emperor’s entourage. Twice the monarch had received the archbishop graciously and had nominated one of his courtiers to the Indian throne, but each time the designated candidate had perished en route to India. The emperor had declined to select a third; but instead of setting out immediately for his homeland, the archbishop had gained permission to visit Rome in the company of the Byzantine ambassadors… Odo relates that the Pope and his cardinals refused to believe these tales until the archbishop swore an oath that convinced them”
The events in this text largely mirror those described in the de Adventu, with some key differences. For one, Odo claims that Patriarch John arrived with a Byzantine retinue while the de Adventu asserts that John arrived with a group of returning papal legates. In another example, Odo records that it is a river that prevents access to the mountain that houses the magical shrine of St. Thomas, rather than the lake de Adventu suggests. Though a minor discrepancy, the motif of rivers is bountiful in Prester John lore.

From Slessarev (p. 12):
“The greatest deviation from De adventu occurs, however, in the explanation of the causes of the Patriarch’s trip to Constantinople. According to Odo, the prince of the country, friendly helper of the archbishop, had suddenly died. This misfortune compelled the prelate to go to the emperor at Byzantium and beg him for another prince. The Greek monarch received him graciously and provided him twice with a suitable candidate from his immediate entourage, but in both cases, for no reason stated, the courtiers died while en route to India.”
For original Latin text, see Zarncke's edition. Read Latin text on Google Books (pp. 843-845)

For an English translation, see Brewer (pp. 41-42).
More on St. Thomas and medieval Christianity in India.
History of the Deeds of David, King of the Indies Historia Gestorum David regis Indorum // Relatio de Davide (1220)

Brewer (p. 107) usefully describes the muddled story behind this text supposedly derived from an Arabic source, but popularized in the West by Jacques de Vitry:
This confused text is a Latin translation of what is thought to be a tract originally written in Arabic by a Christian in Baghdad in 1220-21, but some of the material here was certainly added by its Latin translators. It describes in essence the conquests of Chingis Khan, but instead he is presented as a Christian king named David, great grandson of Prester John, a figure who becomes from this point on a regular feature of the Prester John legend... [A]lthough the text does display some intimate knowledge of the initial movements of the Mongols, the details became so distorted by the time they reached the crusaders that those initial facts became grossly misunderstood.
The text itself attests to how this King David had attacked the King of Persia and conquered several cities along the Asian Steppe, including Bukhara, Samarkand, Khurasan, and Ghazna.

In the first version of the text, King David is identified as "the son of King Israel, the son of King Sarkis, the son of King John, the son of Bulgaboga" (qtd. in Brewer, p. 107). Importantly, King David is not linked to Prester John until the third and final version of the Relatio de Davide begins to circulate.

Silverberg (p. 71) summarizes:
This King David was a Christian, the bishop reported, and was either the son or the grandson of Prester John—although, Bishop Jacques pointed out, “King David was himself commonly called Prester John.” His kingdom was deep in Asia. His involvement in the affair of the Near East had come about because the Caliph of Baghdad had been threatened with war by a fellow Moslem prince, the Shah of Khwarizm; seeing no other ally at hand, the caliph had requested the Nestorian Catholicos—or Patriarch—of Baghdad to summon King David to his aid, and the king had agreed to defend the caliph against the Khwarizmians” (71).

In addition to fueling belief in the kingdom of Prester John, this text had a huge impact on the outcome of the Fifth Crusade. Jacques de Vitry, preacher and crusade propagandist, reaches shared the information contained within the text with crusaders in Damietta. The text promises the dissolution of Islam at a time when King David joins forces with a king in the west. Jacques has the report translated immediately. He then sends letters containing parts of this text to Pope Honorius, King Henry III of England, Duke Leopold of Austria, and to several academics at the University of Paris. Spirits lift within and without the crusader camp, essentially renewing the hope for a Christian recovery of Jerusalem. Buoyed by prophecy and heedless of local conditions, the crusaders at Damietta decide to invade Cairo immediately to fulfill the prophecy, rejecting an agreement with the Sultan Al-Kamil that would have given Jerusalem back to the crusaders in exchange for Damietta. The Nile rises, turning the invasion of Cairo into defeat. The armies of the Fifth Crusade surrender to the Sultan of Egypt, Al-Kamil, Saladin’s nephew, a few weeks later.

Brewer (101-125) collects three versions of this text, all of which tell of a King David prophecied to help the west defeat Islam.

For more on the historical reality animating the Relatio, see Richard.

For a close account of the entire Fifth Crusade, see Powell.
The Embassy of the great Emperor of the Indians, Prester John, to Manuel, King of Portugal
Legatio magni Indorum imperatoris Presbyteri Ioannis ad Emanuelem Lusitaniae regem, anno Domini M.D.XIII (1532)

Damião de Góis' treatise was thought to be one of the earliest European treatments of Ethiopian Christianity. A Latin translation of a work originally written in his native Portuguese (and subsequently banned by the Portuguese Inquisition), the Legatio was then quickly translated into English by fellow Erasmian John More as The Christian Empire of Prester John.

Damião's account includes a description of the Ethiopian embassy to Portugal in 1513 as well as the version of the Letter of Prester John attributed to Ethiopian Queen Eleni (1509).

The Legatio was published in 1532 on the heels of the recent Portuguese embassy to Abyssinia (1520-1526) (led by Diogo Lopes de Sequeira and recorded by Francisco Álvares).

As Blackburn (p. 40) details:
Goes begins the story of Prester John with an important historical document, the so-called "letter of Prester John", which is really the letter of Queen Helena, regent for the twelve-year-old Lebna Dengel, Dawitt II (David II), who became the Prester John of Ethiopia in 1508.
As Silverberg (p. 299) points out, Góis's text, which only covered Matthew's journey to Portgual, should have been obselete now that Álvares had returned to Portgual from Ethiopia, but the account of Álvares's journey would not be published for another eight years.

Góis, ultimately aware of the limitations of his translated text, sought the counsel of Saga za Ab, another Ethiopian ambassador, now stranded in Portugal. Unlike Matthew, who was a non-native Ethiopian layman, Saga za Ab was both a native Ethiopian and a theologian, and ultimately helped Góis correct some of the factual errors of the Legatio. Góis ultimately translated Saga's account into a text published in 1540 and known as the Faith, Religion, and Manners of the Ethiopians.
The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela Masa'ot Binyamin (1164-73)

Benjamin of Tudela, who traveled between 1159 and 1173, ventured as far as Basrah, Iraq. In his Travels, which were recorded in Hebrew, he mentions a powerful Eastern king called Kofar al-Turak whom some readers mistook for the Prester John of the Letter and Otto’s chronicle.

There exist other connections between Benjamin's narrative and the Letter, including a mention of Daniel's tomb while Benjamin of Tudela was in Susa, as well as a mention of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, which Benjamin describes as having a giant mirror similar to that described in Interpolation C of the Letter (Silverberg, 67).

Due perhaps to Benjamin’s narrative, some of the earliest copies of the Letter are in Hebrew, a feature of the legend that has also linked the figure of Prester John to the enigmatic tradition of the Sefer Eldad.

Read Benjamin's Travels online.

For more on Benjamin and the Itinerary

From Baring-Gould (37):
Benjamin of Tudela… traveled in the East between the years of 1159-1173, the last being the date of his death. He wrote an account of his travels, and gives in it some information with regard to a mythical Jew king, who reigned in the utmost splendour over a realm inhabited by Jews alone, situate somewhere in the midst of a desert of vast extent.”
From Silverberg (67):
The third interpolation [of the Letter of Prester John] has Prester John declare that each year he goes into the desert to pay homage to the tomb of Daniel, a figure of some mystical significance with a considerable apocryphal literature of his own. In the late twelfth century the Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela had been shown a tomb said to be Danel’s while he was in the Persian city of Susa, and this, possibly, led to the linking of Daniel and Prester John.
Itinerarius
Itinerarius (c. 1389-1424)

Johannes Witte de Hese, whose fanciful “travels” recall those of the more famous John Mandeville, relates a tale of eastern travel more concerned with engaging and entertaining his audience than with the sober reporting of observations and/or historical fact.

The purported author appears to be an invented persona, á la Mandeville; the only clue given about the author's true identity is the frequent reference to Cologne. This popular text circulated in manuscript form until it was first printed in 1489. At that point it became popularly bound with Prester John chapbooks.

As the Itinerarius's modern editor and translator Scott Westrem observes (p. xi), "the Itinerarius belongs to a group... of texts [that] share a covacbulary that includes common verbs of motion, concrete nouns, and superlative adjectives; a style that combines autobiographical details about travel with ethnographic, political, and mercantile observations; and a perspective that reflects authorial attempts to achieve some comprehension of what has been at times a literally alienating experience."

Given that he claims to have actually successfully traveled to the terrestrial paradise, Silverberg (p. 221) notes that in this respect, Johannes accomplishes the feat of "out-Mandevilling Mandeville."

In the Itinerarius Johannes names Edessa as the city that houses the infamous kingdom of Prester John.

From Westrem’s English translation of Johannes Witte de Hese's Itinerarius:
And sailing farther for fourteen days, one comes to the city of Edissa where Prester John lives. And this city is the capital of his entire realm, and it is located in Upper India at the end of the inhabited earth. And this city is more than twenty-four times the size of the city of Cologne.

And the residence of Prester John is located in the center of the city. And it is a good two German miles long and the same in width as well, for it is square. And it stands atop columns, of which there are said to be nine hundred. And the central column is larger than the others, and at this [column] four large giants have been made out of precious stones and gilded; they stand with bowed heads beneath the palace as if they were supporting the whole palace. And at certain other columns images have been made as well: at one the image of a king and at another the image of a queen, holding baubles and golden goblets in their hands. That is to say, when the image of the king has the babule in its hands, the image of the queen has the golden goblet in its hands taking a drink, and so back and forth. And these images are made of precious stones and gilded….

[The account of Prester John’s kingdom goes on for another 220 lines]
Trauailes of Edward Webbe
Edward Webbe, Chief Master Gunner, His Trauailes (1590)

Original Title: The Rare & most wonderful thinges which Edward Webbe an Englishman borne hath seene & passed in his troublesome travailes in the Citties of Jerusalem, Dammasko, Bethelem & Gallely; and in the Landes of Jewrie, Egipt, Grecia, Russia, & in the Land of Prester John. Wherein is set foorth his extreame slaverie sustained many yeres togither, in the Gallies & wars of the great Turk against the Landes of Persia, Tartaria, Spaine, and Portugall, with the manner of his releasement, and comming into Englande in May last. London. Printed by Ralph Blower, for Thomas Pavier

In this embellished travel account Edward Webbe describes, among other eastern sights, the Christian land of Prester John. Webbe's account bears a close resemblance to that of Mandeville. It was so popular that in its first year (1590) it went through three separate publications in England.

Even as Portuguese missionaries had repeatedly visited Ethiopia and claimed to meet with Prester John, now the mortal king of that land, writers such as Webbe was delighting readers simply by revisiting the tropes of the Letter of Prester John.

Even as late as 1590, the popularity of the original Prester John myth seemed to enduring, even considering the dozens of circulating texts that identified Prester John as the fallible monarch of Ethiopia. Webbe's book found three publishers in 1590 alone.

Still, as Silverberg (p. 316) points out, the book had its detractors. Richard Hakluyt leaves Webbe's story conspicuously absent in his three-volume collection of significant European voyages in 1598, and Samuel Purchas castigates Webbe as "a mere fabler" in 1625.

In terms of the book's relation to the Prester John legend, Edel Sample relates,
[I]t is clear that Webbe relishes the task of describing the magnificence of Prester John’s court and the strange sights in his country. Webbe writes of the customs, political relations, and strange creatures that he witnessed. Three woodcuts are included; the first depicts a bearded “wilde man”, and we learn that one of these men can be found in Prester John’s court and another can be found in Constantinople. The text explains that this savage man is a public spectacle; chained by the neck, he is covered in hair, wears a mantle, and eats the flesh of condemned criminals. The other two woodcuts show a unicorn rampant and an elephant (“three score and seventeen Unicornes and Oliphants” live as tame pets in a park of Prester John’s.) Other texts on Asia and the Middle East may have influenced Webbe’s account of this ruler and his exotic land. For instance, his account of the sixty kings that daily serve Prester John is reminiscent of the multiple tributary kings that serve Bajazeth and Tamburlaine in Marlowe’s play (c.1587); the use of skulls as culinary utensils appears in Solinus’s Polyhistor (1584); while accounts of strange beasts, ‘wild men’, and cannibals were not uncommon and appear in Solinus and in Pliny (1585).

Webbe identifies Prester John’s kingdom with the traditional worldly Paradise, following Mandeville almost completely. However, it can also be surmised that theTravels bears some relation to the Russian theories about Prester John that circulated among the Old Believers, who claimed that Prester John's land was a haven for religious dissenters.

Brewer (pp. 230-31) excerpts the relevant section on the land of Prester John.

Read the full Travailes online.

Read more about Webbe and his Travels.
Supplementum Chronicarum
Supplementum Chronicarum (1483)

Composed by Giacomo Filippo Foresti in Bergamo and first printed in Venice in 1483, this "Latin Supplement to the Chronicles," as its name implies, takes the form of a supplement to a standard universal history.

The text, recorded in 15 books, concerns itself with the most significant characters of world history, from Greek mythological heroes to Old Testament prophet, and in so doing also includes material that related to the legend of Prester John.

Foresti comes to the subject of Prester John after a discussion of an otherwise unsubstantiated Ethiopian embassy to Europe that took place in the first decade of the fourteenth century. His discussion includes a reference to the lost map of Giovanni da Carignano's lost 1306 portolan chart, which has become to be understood by Prester John scholars to be the earliest text that places Prester John kingdom in Ethiopia.

Of the embassy, Foresti writes:
“Indeed, it is known that this emperor in the time of Clement V in the year of our Lord 1306 sent 30 legates to the king of the Spains; and let it be known that he was offering him aid against the infidels. They came also to Avignon to present themselves reverently to Clement V, the Pontifex Maximus, and instructed by many apostolic letters, they went to the well worth seeing places of the relics of the Apostles Peter and Paul in Rome. Having seen these, they returned with joy to their own home. But in Genoa they had to wait many days for the time to sail back, and while they waited, they had sat down [as] it happens and were asked much about their rites, customs and regions before they left, on which [this] same author has written.”
Bergamo's entry on the meeting goes as follows (qtd. in Silverberg, p. 165):
A certain priest [Carignano], the rector of St. Mark in Genoa, a truly excellent man, published a treatise, which he also called a 'map.' Among many things written in it about the state of this nation [Ethiopia] he reports that Prester John is set over that people as patriarch; and he says that under him are 127 archbishoprics, each of which has twenty bishops. Those who are to be reborn they baptize in the Roman manner, In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; and in the same way they celebrate the Sacrament of the Eucharist, with this one exception, that they sing the Paternoster before the elevation of the Sacrament... It is said that their emperor is most Christian, to whom seventy-four kings and almost innumerable princes pay allegiance, except those kings who observe the laws of Mahomet but submit to the emperor in other things."
Later versions contain excerpts from the Treatise on the Pontificate of Prester John, which is credited in the text to Poggio Braciolini, secretary to Pope Eugenius IV, whose source, according to Silverberg (p. 222) was Nicolò de' Conti.

Foresti mixes history and legend, treating episodes of cultural myth and Christian martyrology as historical fact. It is in this context that his account of the 1306 Ethiopian embassy to Rome should be considered.

Although once understood as the source of Giovanni da Carignano's lost account on the embassy, Verena Krebs has recently questioned the veracity not only of Foresti's account but also of the historicity of an early-fourteenth century Ethiopian embassy to Europe, citing the account's resemblance to aspects of the Prester John legend and Golden Legend along with the "socio-political entity of Solomonic Ethiopia."
The Book of John Mandeville
The Book of John Mandeville (c. 1356-1360)

Compiled in the mid-fourteenth century, the notorious Book of John Mandeville had a lasting effect on European understanding of world geography well into the eighteenth century.

This medieval bestseller was translated into English, Latin, Spanish, German Dutch, Bohemian, Danish, and Gaelic. The oldest surviving copy, written in an Anglicized French, is dated to 1371. As with the Letter of Prester John, the Book of John Mandeville resists easy generic classification, with readers describing the text with terms including 'livre', 'geste', 'romant', 'tractatus', 'itenerarium', 'voiage' and 'trauayle' (Niayesh, 160).

Written from the persona of an almost certainly fictional English knight, "Mandeville" relates a highly imaginative journey from England to the gates of the Earthly Paradise and back (for "Mandeville" understood the world as round). Round as Mandeville's world was, the spiritual and geographical "center" remained in Jerusalem, often quipped to be the "navel" of the world during the European Middle Ages. As Rosemary Tzanaki (p.11) writes, The Book of John Mandeville depicts a "religious geography" with Jerusalem at its center, "stressing the unity of this world through its very diversity."

In his journey to the locales furthest away from Jerusalem, approaching that Earthly Paradise from which "Mandeville" finds himself barred, he journeys through Pantaxore, his name for the realm of Prester John. Referencing the theory of the antipodes, "Mandeville" comments that this land of Pantaxore lies "foot agaynst foot to Englonde."

Mandeville's version of the Prester John legend integrates the European knowledge of the Mongol Empire into the story of Prester John, even inventing a ceremony in which Prester John's daughter is ceremoniusly wed to the "grete Chane" and vice versa.

In the early seventeenth century, Samuel Purchas, an armchair traveler himself, declared Mandeville "the greatest Asian traveler that ever the world had" (qtd. in Silverberg, p. 148). The renowned British geographer Richard Hakluyt, a contemporary of Purchas, referred to Mandeville in his Principall Navigations as "eruditum et insignem Authorem" [erudite and distinguished author] (Brooks, p. 88).

Although a highly dubious travel tale, the influence of Mandeville's geographical lore on European cultural understanding of the wider world is immense: Niayesh, referencing the text's immense influence on later travelers, dubs the Mandeville character as the "knight of transmission" (155). Above all, this text remained impactful for its skillful weaving together of earlier travel narratives and its contention of a global Christendom.

Mandeville casts Prester John as the famed figurehead of an unknowable realm through which the belief he clearly inspired may persist. The book clearly cribs from earlier travel narratives and encyclopedias--including the writings of Vincent of Beauvais, John of Plano Carpini, Ascelin of Lombardia, William of Rubruck, Marco Polo, and Odoric of Pordenone-- but often expands on those accounts through a clear desire to entertain. Though the literary value of Mandeville’s text itself has been debated, its influence on later medieval literary texts cannot be denied.

Mandeville returns Prester John to his former glory, as detailed by Heng (p. 134):
An influential travel romance like Mandeville’s Travels, which strategically prefers to emphasize the older, nostalgically legendary aura of Prester John, also shrewdly prefers to underemphasize the Nestorian character of the Christianity anchored into place by the localization of the Prester John story in preceding thirteenth- and fourteenth-century historical accounts. While allowing for some variation of doctrine and practice from the Latin Church, in Prester John’s empire, the Travels vigorously underscores the ultimately universal principles of Christianity shared in common with John’s people—the most important commonalities of faith and devotion— and celebrates the piety and virtue of John’s folk: “This emperor Prester John is a Christian man, and the most part of his land also, if all be it so that they have not all the articles of our belief so clearly as we have. Nonetheless they believe in God, Father and Son and Holy Ghost; and full devout men they are and true each one to the other, and there is neither with them fraud nor guile.
By emphasizing the devout Christianity of Prester John’s people, and winking at their Nestorian difference, then, the Travels is able to present John’s empire, in its Christian ideality, as a heterotopian mirror for Europe: a mirror in which Europe might see an exotic version of itself, dressed up as a successful Christian empire that happens to be located elsewhere. Simultaneously John’s domain is also conspicuously partnered with the Khan’s imperial domain in such a way as to suggest that John’s realm functions as a kind of Christian threshold to the Khanate, a counterpart-in-empire that mimics the Great Khan’s vast imperial enterprise" (281).
The history of the Mandeville text is complex and, for many, there is no one preferred edition. The most complete edition probably remains Malcolm Letts’ edition and translation of the Egerton text.

For a succinct summary of the publication history of the Travels, see the first footnote in Moseley.

For more on the text, see Kohanski and Benson’s introduction to the TEAMS edition, available here.

Read the Middle English text online.
Read a modernized translation online.
Carignano Portolan Map
Carignano Portolan Map (1305-1327)

Carignano was known primarily as a cartographer and geographer, but he also wrote a now-lost treatise on Ethiopia based on an alleged meeting in Genoa with the Ethiopian embassy that traveled to Europe in 1306.

A summary of the long-lost commentary to the map can be found in Jacopo Filippo Foresti’s Supplementum Chronicarum.

Carignano's Portolan Map, based in part from the information he gleaned from the Ethiopian embassy, is the first known document to correctly situate the "black Christians" of Abyssinia/Ethiopia between the Blue and White Nile. According to Salvadore, "his was the first map to abandon the copycat style of mapmaking typical of medieval Europe, which simply proposed again and again geographical knowledge that originated in antiquity" (p. 602).

On the map, Carignano describes the land of Prester John thusly (165):
"Prester John is set over that people [Ethiopians] as patriarch; and he says that under him are 127 archbishoprics, each of which has 20 bishops. Those who are to be reborn they baptize in the Roman manner…it is said that their emperor is most Christian, to whom 74 kings and almost innumerable princes pay allegiance, except those kings who observe the laws of Mahomet but submit to the emperor in other things."

Salvadore (p. 3) elegantly captures the significance of the alleged visit that inspired the the map and and on the map itself as a bellwether inaugrating the tropes that come to dominate European discourse over the ensuing three centuries on the potential of a European-African alliance:
[T]here can be no type of conclusive interpretation of the Ethiopian transit through Genoa; yet, it remains extremely significant because it is the first recorded case of an Ethiopian visit to Europe and, if accepted as an embassy, also the first recorded African embasssy to a European sovereign. The few toponyms Carignano included on this map, along with the alleged commentary, documented not only the first timid Ethiopian steps into Europe but also the equally timid European attempts to move past a variety of myths and misconceptions of anicent and medieval derivation as to the existence, identity, and location of Christian communities beyond the Middle East. More generally, the visit adumbrates the emergence of an encounter between the Kingdom of Ethiopia an dvarious polities in Western Mediterranean Europe. It presents tropes that will appear in similar guises time and time again in the ensuing centuries: Ethiopian embassies seeking Christian allies, pious Ethiopian monks defying the odds of early modern travel to find salvation and knowledge at the heart of Western Christendom, European traders seeking commercial opportunities, and lay and ordained intellectuals, chroniclers, and mapmakeres grappling with the notion of a country to be found in the Indies and populated by black Christians.

From Beckingham (199):
"This map, which was in Florence, was destroyed during World War II, but the lower edge, where Ethiopia would have been shown, had already been severely mutilated so that the reproductions published before its disappearance can tell us little that is relevant to the embassy. It was signed Johannes presbyler rector sancti Marci de portu Janue me fecit. Fischer, who first published the map, accepted the identification of Johannes presbyter with Giovanni da Carignano, but contended that the embassy came from Persia and must have been responsible for some information about the western part of the Ilkhanid empire which the map provides.”
From Beckingham (209):
“At least since an Ethiopian embassy had come to Avignon during the papacy of Clement V (1305-14) the ruler of Ethiopia had sometimes been identified with Prester John, perhaps for the first time in the map of Giovanni da Carignano, which was destroyed during World War II. Giovanni was the priest of the harbour church of San Marco at Genoa and had himself met the envoys on their way back to Ethiopia.”
The Great Magnificence of Prester John, Lord of Greater India and of Ethiopia The Great Magnificence of Prester John, Lord of Greater India and of Ethiopia
[Lagran Magnificentia del Preste Ianni Signore dell India Maggiore & della Etiopia]
(ca. 1499)

Also referred to as the Treatise on the Supreme Prester John, Pope and Emperor of India and Ethiopia, this poem by Giuliano Dati was the result of an Italian interest in Dati's omission of Prester John from his rhymed version of the letter sent by Columbus's admiral, detailing their adventures in the Indies.

Consisting of 59 eight-line stanzas, this text was derived from Jacopo Filippo Foresti's Treatise on the Pontificate of Prester John but, as Silverberg (p. 223) claims, before the "chapbook plagiarisms" of Foresti became available. Dati's text also draws from Andrea da Barberino's Guerino il Meschino and another text entitled Treatise on the Ten Nations and Sects of Christians.

In the text, Prester John is referred to as the ruler of the Indians (here designated as one of world's the "ten nations"). Here we see the blending of India and Ethiopia as Dati brings together the conversion of the Ethiopians by St. Matthew and the conversion of the Indians by St. Thomas (whose tomb here rests in Mylapur) into a single story set in a single homogenous-seeming territory.

Much of the text takes up the traditional catalogue of wonders, hearkening back to the Letter of Prester John. The ending of the poem promises a sequel, which has not survived, if it was written.

Rogers (p. 94) explains the story surrounding the poem's origin:
Columbus had disappointed the reading public of Europe, but his interpreter in verse [Dati] determined to make the necessary amends to his Italian reading public. Possibly prompted by suspicious that his rhymed version of Columbus in reality echoed a West Indian song, he projected an Indian cycle of two songs, composed of ingredients which would leave no reader dissatisfied. His first song, undated but of the period 1493-95, bears the traditionally imposing title Treatise on the Supreme Prester John, Pope and Emperor of India and Ethiopia. On his second poem Dati bestowed the simple title of Second Song of India.

The title of the first of this duo instantly recalls the Treatise on the Pontificate of Prester John by Foresti da Bergamo. Perhaps the rhymester-priest saw fit to give equal importance to the imperial aspect in closer accordance with the intent of the original twelfth-century letter from Prester John because he, living in the age of the Renaissance popes, sought to portray an ideal Church-state relation.

Rogers (p. 97-8) continues on the details of this text:
The first song appeared in at least four early editions... Giuliano Dati rhymes his reading in fifty-nine stanzas of ottava rima. He opens with an enumeration of the then nations of Christians, the order of occurrence- Latin, Greeks, Indians, Jacobites, Nestorians, Marionites, Armenians, Georgians, Syrians, and Mozarabs- and the spelling leaving no doubt of the poet's source [Guerino il Meschino]... The treatist on the ten Christian nations was published about 1490 in conjunction with the Joannes de Hese itinerary... Foresti's Treatise on the Pontificate of Prester John first joined the chapbook parade in about 1499... As Dati, writing before August 10, 1495, now resorts to this latter treatise, he obviously employed an edition of the Supplement to the Chronicles. The spelling of Prester John's residential city- Bibrithe in the Supplement, Brichbrich in the chapbook version, the former in Dati- confirms this supposition.

Here, as Brooks (p. 155) details, the frontispiece of the poem "depicts Prester John with decidedly European features, and the setting of the priest-king's court is not unlike those found in Europe at the time."

Brooks continues:
The unknown artist who created the frontispeice illustration provided this Prester John with an impressive crown containing jewels in the shape of the fleur de lis. Prester John in this image appears to be blessing the supplicants who remain seated before him, and he holds up two fingers in much the same manner as does the Roman Catholic Pope. The image is suggestive of a ruler with both religious and secular authority, certainly in keeping with Prester John’s role as king and patriarch.
The people who surround Prester John in the image also bear similarities to depictions of Europeans in the late fifteenth century. Interestingly, Prester John finds himself holding court over twelve individuals, perhaps an apostolic tip of the cap to Christ. Eleven of the visitors to Prester John's court are bearded and wear cloaks and hats not unlike those of fifteenth century Franciscan prelates, while one person directly to the right of Prester John has decidedly feminine features and is wearing what appears to be a nun’s habit. One is tempted to draw parallels between the symbolism in this image and Leonardo da Vinci’s L'Ultima Cena: the timing fits, but there may be additional reasons why this image shares some similarities with the aforementioned Milanese mural of such historical renown. In this illustration to the chapbook’s frontispiece, the artist depicted Prester John’s court above seven steps, each of which contains an admonition to readers to flee (“FVGE”) the seven deadly sins.

A copy of the the printed poem, which was published in Florence, is available at the British Museum: C.20. C.23.
More on Ethiopia's image in World Literature.
The Travels of Marco Polo
Devisement du monde (c. 1298)

The Devisement (or Livres des merveilles du monde) remains one of the most well-known narratives to survive the Middle Ages. Dictated by an imprisoned Marco Polo to fellow inmate and veteran romancer Rustichello da Pisa, the book records– and sometimes embellishes– the travels of Polo (along with his father and uncle) to the court of Kublai Khan in the late-thirteenth century.

Although written in French, the text was quickly translated into Italian and Latin. More than one hundred manuscripts survive, each slightly different from the others. The Travels became a medieval best seller, even though the imaginative flourishes of copyists makes it difficult to determine what the original text might have looked like.

Marco Polo's Travels features the figure of Prester John in a number of chapters (64-68, 74, 109-110, 139, 200). Polo, following the Dominican missionaries that visited the Mongol Empire before him, relates a tale of Prester John that demystifies the legendary qualities of the letter all the while testifying to the historical existence of an eastern Christian prince.

For Marco Polo, Prester John (or Un-khan) was a powerful prince who ruled over the Tartars (Mongols), but was overthrown, in a battle Polo himself describes, by Genghis/Chinggis Khan. Later, in the mid-14th century, the imaginary travels of Sir John Mandeville will crib from Polo's now-canonical observations about the east.

Silverberg (p. 132) puts Marco Polo's reduction of the Prester John legend succinctly:
For Marco, Prester John was a khan of the steppes, and he was dead, and his descendent of the sixth generation, King George, ruled the insignificant principality of Tenduc as Kublai Khan's vassal.

Even if Polo's narrative demystified the legend of Prester John, its romance narrative style, combined with its fascinating insights, some of which related tangentially to the Prester John legend (including visiting the shrine of St. Thomas), did not ultimately do much to diminish European interest in Prester John.

Background on Polo’s expedition.
See Polo’s route.

Brewer edits and translates the Prester John portions of Polo's travels (pp. 171-188).
Silverberg excerpts the three mentions of Prester John in the Travels.
More on the travels and their veracity.
Chronicon Syriacum
Makhtbhanuth Zabhne (c. 1258-1286)

Bar-Hebraeus's Chronicle, written in Syriac, aspires to narrate world history from Creation until the current day, in two books (concerning secular and sacred history, respectively).

In the Chronicon Syriacum, which concerns civil and political history, Bar-Hebraeus records an occurrence in the early eleventh century that connects to the legend of Prester John. According to the Chronicon the Mongol Keraits of the East Steppe adopted Nestorian Christianity in 1007. This is significant insofar as the early European legends speaking of a powerful Indian prince John cast this figure too as Nestorian and it was not known at that time whether or not Nestorian Christianity had spread that far east.

Bar-Hebraeus then goes on to mention that it was a King David who, as chief of these same Keraits, was defeated in 1202 by Genghis Khan, who was once King John's vassal. The Syriac documentation of this events matches those of western authors, including the narrative of Marco Polo's journey. There, however, King David/Prester John is known as Ong Khan.

From Silverberg:
How are we to account for William’s [of Rubruck] linking of Togrul and Kuchluk the Naiman (‘King or Presbyter John’)? They were in fact not brothers, nor of the same tribe, nor of the same generation, nor could Togril, who died in 1203, possibly have succeeded to the throne of Kuchluk, who outlived him by sixteen years. A clue to the source of his error can be found in the Chronicon Syriacum of the Syrian cleric Gregory Abulfaraj Bar-Hebraeus, who lived from 1226 to 1286: speaking of the conversion of the Keraits to Christianity, he notes that in the time of the Mongol dominion they were ruled by an ‘Ung Khan who is called Malik Yuhanna,’ that is, ‘King John.’

See Brewer (pp. 169-170) for the English translation of the account of Prester John in the Chronicon.
Chronica Boemorum John de' Marignolli's History of Bohemia (c. 1355), commissioned by Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV (r. 1346-1378), is composed in the style of a universal history and includes a lengthy detour to the Orient, which identifies associates Ethiopia as “the land of Prester John” and notes the kingdom’s proximity to the terrestrial paradise with the ability to control the Nile River. The text survives in three manuscripts.

Kurt cites the relevant passage (p. 6):
‘The Gyon River ... surrounds the country of Ethiopia, where are only black men, and which is called the land of Prester John. It is thought that this river is the Nile, which descends to Egypt, across a place called Abasty [Abasia, Abyssinia], where are Christians of the apostle St Matthew.’

From Silverberg (p. 170):
John de' Marignolli wrote an account of his Eastern travels which, in the words of his nineteenth-century translator Henry Yule, is to be found, 'like unexpected fossils in a mud-bank, imbedded in a Chronicle of Bohemia' that he composed about 1355. This lengthy interpolation enters the chronicle on the flimsiest of pretenses: Marignolli chooses to begin his history of Bohemia with the Creation and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, and, having got as far as the statement that Eden is located "beyond India," is reminded that he himself once visited India, which leads him to say, "And now to insert some brief passages of what I have seen myself ... " An anecdotal description of the Orient that runs to more than fifty printed pages follows.
History of Ethiopia Historia de Etiopía a Alta ou Abassia

German historian Hiob Ludolf was an academic authority on the Ethiopia of his day, having befriended an Ethiopian Christian in Rome who became the main source for his understanding of the country. Published in 1681, Ludolf's History of Ethiopia (1681) argued that Prester John was not the Ethiopian negus; instead, Ludolf reasoned, Prester John must have been the Asian monarch he was considered centuries before. Here, following Balthazar Téllez's theory, Ludolf argues that Covilhā was responsible for the misattribution of Prester John to Ethiopia:

[Covilhā, traveling] in some of the Ports of the Red Sea, heard much talk of a most Potent Christian King of the Abessines, that us'd to carry a Cross in his Hands; as also of his Subjects, who were great Favourers if not Followers of the Christian Religion. Believing it therefore to be of little moment whether this famous Monarch liv'd in Asia or in Africa, he certainly persuades himself, as being Ignorant both in History and Geography that this was the Prince so much sought after.... These glad Tidings the Portugals sooner believ'd, than consider'd, and so spread the News all over Europe for real Truth; Credulaity gaining easily upon those that are ignorant of Foreign Affairs and Kingdoms.

(qtd. in Silverberg, p. 317)

This argument became popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even as the link between Prester John and the Ethiopian monarch predates Covilhā's expedition.
Nestorianism Although more accurately known as the Assyrian Church or the East Syrian Church, the term Nestorian abided in medieval sources to describe a sect of Christianity originating from the Syriac tradition of Eastern Christianity. The name 'Nestorian' refers to the teachings of Nestorius (c. 386-450), who, from his position of Patriarch of Constantinople, taught the doctrine of a two-natured (or dyophysite) Christ. This belief, which professes that Christ had separate human and divine natures, became a distinguishing doctrine for the sect. Nestorius' dyophysitism was formally condemned as heretical as the Council of Ephesus (431) and reiterated at the Council of Chalcedon (451).

Nonetheless, in the Middle Ages, Nestorian Christians could be found as far East as China (see the map below). It should then be unsurprising that Prester John was widely rumored to be of the Nestorian faith. Given the theories surrounding the burial place of the Apostle Thomas, a figure closely associated with the Prester John legend, it is notable that one of the first major centers of Nestorianism was Edessa, where a school of Nestorian theology thrived until 489.

As a protected minority in the Middle East, Nestorians played a vital role in the cultural development taking place in the Arab world in the ninth and tenth centuries (Silverberg, 22). The story of medieval Nestorianism overlapped with that of the Mongol's beginning in the eleventh century, as Nestorian missionaries traveling eastward had reached Mongol provinces decades before the Mongol's systematic takeover of much of the Asian Steppe and Middle East. This explains the number of Nestorians that European travelers (from William of Rubruck to Marco Polo to Odoric of Pordenone) observed among the Mongols in their travels (even wives of the khan).

Due to its outlawed teachings and its apparently accelerating popularity across eastern locales, Nestorianism was treated in Catholic Europe as both a feared heresy (perhaps more serious than all "heresies" but that of Islam) as well as a missionary opportunity. Thus it should not be surprising that several missions to Prester John's kingdom were ordered for the ostensible purpose of converting the Nestorian Prester John to Catholicism.
Pêro da Covilhã
In 1487, after Prince Henry's attempts to find a sea route around Africa to lead to Prester John's east African kingdom had proved difficult, Portuguese King João II chose courtiers Pêro da Covilhã and Afonso de Paiva to travel via the Mediterranean and Egypt to Ethiopia to acquire knowledge of the origin of important spices, such as cinnamon, and to meet with Prester John. This mission was commissioned in parallel to that of Bartolomeu Dias, who was commissioned one year later to seek the Ethiopian kingdom by sailing around the southern tip of Africa (which he succeeded in doing in in 1488). Nonetheless, Pêro's mission became the most famous of all explorations into Africa to search for Prester John.

The Portuguese Covilhã, who was around 40 at the time, had spent much of his earlier life in Castile in the service of Don Juan de Guzmán, brother of Castilian Duke Enrique de Guzmán, but returned to Portugal when war broke out between Portugal and Spain. Covilhã's attached himself to King Afonso V and then to his son João II on the latter's ascendency to the throne in 1481. Covilhã's fluency in Arabic, Portuguese, and Castilian, along with his attested loyalty and reputed swordsmanship, made him a good candidate for this important diplomatic journey.

The resulting journey was arduous, full of twists and turns, and gave birth to several separate accounts, and the most authoratative, Francisco Álvares' True Information of the Lands of Prester John of the Indies (1526).

Silverberg admirably summarizes the complex journey (pp. 201-205):
In May 1487, Covilha and Paiva bade their sovereign farewell, receiving from him four hundred golden cruzados and a letter of credit that would be honored by any European banker. They went by way of Barcelona to Naples, thence to Rhodes, where, advised by some Portuguese who lived there to disguise themselves as merchants, they bought a cargo of honey. Then they sailed to Alexandria, where they both fell ill of fever; they seemed so close to death that the governor of the city, who was entitled to attach the property of foreiguers who died in Alexandria, confiscated their honey. Upon their unexpected recovery, they sued the overeager official for an indemnity, and, after a long delay, received some money with which they bought new goods. Going on to Cairo, they joined a party of Moorish merchants and in the spring of 1488 sailed with them down the Red Sea in an Arab dhow as far as Aden. There they parted, Paiva to go to Ethiopia while Covilha took passage for India in order to study the spice trade closer to its source. They agreed to meet eventually in Cairo.

Covilha, boarding an Arab ship, reached India after a month's voyage, landing at the port of Cananor. Journeying up and down the Malabar Coast, the resourceful Portuguese observed the activities of the Arab and Hindu spice merchants, learning of commodity prices, sources of supply, the prevailing winds governing tile shipping seasons, and much else. (Among his discoveries was the information that there was open sea beyond the southern tip of Africa, a fact that Bartolomeu Dias was independently learning about ti,e same time.) To confirm this news of a sea route around Africa, Covilha left India for Ormuz, the great mart on the Persian Gulf, and in 1489 headed by ship along the Arabian coast to East Africa. Reaching it well south of Ethiopia, he ventured as far as Sofala at 21 degrees S, some two thirds of the way down Africa's eastern shore; Arab traders were busy there, and he gained from them more details of the seaway around Africa, by which, he saw, Europe and the Orient could readily be linked. After collecting a wealth of data about harbors and sailing conditions in this part of Africa that would later be of immense value to Portugal, Covilha returned to Cairo, reaching it in 1490.

There was no sign of Paiva. A lengthy investigation revealed that Covilha's companion had lately arrived in Cairo from parts unknown in the last stages of a grave illness, and had died without telling anyone where he had been. At this news Covilha decided to go back to Portugal; but then he encountered two Portuguese Jews whom King Joao had sent to find him. They bore letters from the king reaffirming the importance of visiting the court of Prester John, and, since Covhilha had no way of knowing whether Paiva had succeeded in reaching Ethiopia, he realized it was necessary for him to go there himself. One of the Jews agreed to accompany him part of the way; the other received from Covilha a detailed account of his discoveries on the coasts of India and Africa, and carried it back to Portugal. Thus the information Covilha had gathered was made available to the coming generation of Portuguese explorers, who would make use of it in opening the hoped-for route to the Indies.

Covilha and his new companion, Rabbi Abraham, sailed to Aden; then, because the rabbi had business in Ormuz, Covilha escorted him there before turning toward Ethiopia. His progress toward Prester john was leisurely and indirect: he sailed to Jidda and then, disguised as a Moslem pilgrim, dressed in white and with his head shaved, he made the perilous journey to Mecca apparently just to satisfy his own curiosity; he went on even to Medina, and then to Sinai, where at the Monastery of St. Catherine he heard Mass for the first time since his departure from the Christian world four years before. At last, in 1493, he penetrated Ethiopia and presented himself to King Eskender (1478- 94), who greeted the ambassador from Joao of Portugal with great warmth. Flattered by the attention of an envoy from a brother Christian monarch of a distant land, Eskender promised to send Covilha back to his homeland laden with gifts and honors.

But Eskender died before Covilha was able to leave, and his brother Na'od (1494-1508) ascended the throne. Na'od treated Covilha graciously, but when the Portuguese ambassador reminded the king of his wish to go home, Na'od replied that it was not the custom of his land to allow foreign visitors to leave. And so Pero da Covilha's travels came to their end: he was marooned in the land of Prester John, like the painter Nicolo Brancaleone and a few dozen other Europeans who had happened to go to Ethiopia, and, like old Brancaleone, he was still there when the next ambassador from Portugal anrived at prester John's court in 1520. Francisco Alvares, a member of that ambassador's retinue, met Covilha and took down a full account of his adventures and of his quarter of a century in Ethiopia. According to Alvares, Covilha had applied to Na'od's Son and successor, King Lebna Dengel, for permission to depart, but this king also "would not give it, saying that he [Covilha] had not come in his time, and his predecessors had given him lands and lordships to rule and enjoy, and that leave he could not give him, and so he remains." Alvares relates that Covilha had been given "a wife with very great riches and possessions. He had sons by her and we saw them .... This Pero da Covilha is a man of great wit and intelligence and there is no one else like him at court; he is one who knows all the languages that can be spoken, both of Christians, Moors, Ethiopians, and heathens, and who got to know all the things for which he was sent; he gives an account of them as though he had them present before him. For this reason he is much liked by the Prester and all the court." When the new Portuguese envoys arrived, Alvares says, "a passionate desire to return to his country came upon him. He went to ask leave of the Prester and we went with him and we urged it with great insistence and begged it of him. Yet no order for it was ever given." Eventually the emissaries of 1520 were able to arrange their own departure from Ethiopia, but Covilha stayed behind, and remained in Prester John's land to the end of his life.

Baldridge covers the entire journey and all of its adventure and misadventure in his 2012 historical monograph.

Jump to the Letters from Pêro da Covilhã
Francesco Suriano Born in Venice, Francesco Suriano (1445-c.1485) was a Franciscan friar who, over the course of travels from 1480-1485, composed an account of his travels to the Holy Land entitled Il Trattato di Terra Santa e dell'Oriente, aided by Sister Catherine Guarnieri da Osimo.

The account, sometimes known as Iter S (Silverberg, 190), provides a record of Suriano's travels with fellow Franciscans from Cairo up the Nile to the Red Sea through modern Sudan and into Ethiopia, wherein the group spends time at the court of Prester John.
Life of St. Louis
Livre des saintes paroles et des bons faiz de nostre saint roy Looÿs (1305-1309)

Written as a biography of Louis IX during the Seventh Crusade, Jean de Joinville's Life of Saint Louis documents the culture surrounding the Crusade. Using information from André Longjumeau, Jean narrates the destruction of Prester John by the Mongols (Silverberg, 96-111). The story is similar to those recounted by the other missionaries deployed to Khanbaliq in the mid-thirteenth century.

Vitale (p. 16) summarizes Joinville’s contribution on the legend:
Joinville, who accompanied Louis IX on a Crusade in 1248-49, writes in his Chronicle some fifty years later that Andrew of Longjumeau and his brother, both Dominican priests who spoke Arabic, had been sent as emissaries to the Mongols. Andrew reported to Joinville that the Tartars (Mongols) who had been subject to Prester John had risen up and defeated him.

Joinville's describes the death of Prester John (qtd. in Brewer, pp. 193-4):
After [a Mongol prince] had arranged and ordered these things, he said to them: 'My Lords, the strongest of our enemies is Prester John. And I command that tomorrow you all be ready to move against him, and if it happens that he defeats us (may God spare us from this!), may everyone do the best he can. And if we defeat him, command that the occasion extend for three days and three nights, and that no one be so bold as to put his hand to spoils, but rather kill people, because after we have secured the victory, I will distribute the spoils among you so well and so fairly that everyone will be satisfied'. To this they all agreed. The next day they moved against their enemies, and they were victorious, as God had wished. They killed all those whom they found defending with arms, and they did not kill any whom they found in religious garb, the priests and the other religious men. The other people of the land of Prester John who were not in the conflict all placed themselves in lheir power.

See also Silverberg, pp. 96-111.
Read an English translation of Joinville here.
To read Joinville in the original French see Wailly’s edition.
Pope Alexander III Born Roland of Siena, Pope Alexander III (c. 1100-1181) served as Pope from 1159 to 1181 after serving as professor of theology at Bologna, cardinal, and then papal chancellor.

His papacy was marked, in part, by a longstanding power struggle with Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, the man who added sacrum (holy) to the title of Roman emperor. Frederick eventually acquiesced to Alexander in the Peace of Venice, "the most thorough surrender of civil power to clerical authority since Henry IV's submission at Canossa exactly one hundred years earlier" (Silverberg, 60).

That same year (1177), Alexander allegedly penned his own letter to Prester John in which he urges the priest-king to be instructed in Catholicism by Alexander's personal physician, Master Phillip.
Il Trattato di Terra Santa e dell’Oriente Il Trattato di Terra Santa e dell’Oriente (1485)

This text, written around 1485 but unpublished until 1900, narrates the travels of Francesco Suriano, as recorded by Sister Catherine Guarnieri da Osimo. Among the places the group travels to is Ethiopia, in which they find a cosmopolitan court of Prester John populated with a number of nobles from Europe and the Holy Land:
"Having crossed the river [the Nile] we traveled for ten days and reached the court of the great king Prester John, which was in a place called Barrar. In which court we found ten Italians, men of good repute, viz. Master Gabriel, a Neapolitan, Master Jacomo di Garzoni, a Venetian, Master Pietro da Monte from Venice, Master Philyppo, a Burgundian, Master Consalvo, a Catalan, Master Ioane da Fiesco, a Genoese, and Master Lyas of Beirut [?], who went there with papal letters. All these had been there for twenty-five years. But since 1480 there had gone there Master Zuan Darduino, nephew of Nicolo da Ie Carte, a Venetian, my dear friend and an honest man of good repute, Cola di Rosi, a Roman, who had changed his name to Zorzi, Matheo of Piedmont, Nicolò, a Mantuan, Master Nicolò Branchalion, a Venetian, Brother Ioane aforesaid from Calabria and Batista da Imola. I asked these men what they had gone to do in this strange land. They replied saying that their intention was to seek jewels and precious stones. But since the king did not allow them to return they were all ill content, although they were all well rewarded and provided for by the king, each in accordance with his rank." (qtd. in Silverberg, 190)
Silverberg notes that of the many names mentioned above, only painter Nicolò Branchalion (Brancaleone) was confirmed to have been in Ethiopia by other sources, having been commissioned by Emperor Baeda Maryam I (successor to Zara Yakob) to paint several significant, controversial devotional works in local churches.

Suriano's description of Barrar itself not only pales in comparison to the expectations of what a Prester John kingdom might look like but also appears to go out of its way to diminish the architectural and cultural accomplishments of Ethiopia. Suriano claims that the only "buildings" that exist in Barrar are the churches built to memorialize its emperors, and though the text notes that the population is substantial and willing to fight to defend Christendom, he claims that the soldiers lack the weaponry to competitively engage in modern combat.

In chapter 34 of the text, Suriano also mentions the epistle sent Paulo de Chanedo to Prester John (Prete Iane).

Read on Google Books.
Purchas His Pilgrimes Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and others (1613)

Published in four volumes, Samuel Purchas' Purchas His Pilgrimes attempted to provide a full, Anglican overview of the world as it was known at the time. In it, he retells many of the most famous European travel narratives that highlight the diversity of Earth's inhabitants.

Although Purchas never traveled himself, he certainly familiarized himself with the theories about Prester John. He identified Prester John with the Ethiopian monarch, averring that this figure "was called Priest John, by error of Covilhā, follwed by other Portugals in the first discoverie, applying by mis-coinceit through some like occurrents in the Relations in M. Polo and others touching Presbyter John, in the North-east parts of Asia" (qtd. in Silverberg, p. 317).

As Brewer writes,
Purchas, with scholarly acuity...reviews the various hypotheses as to the location of Prester John and the origin of his name, eventually concluding that he was once an Asian monarch whose name was mistakenly applied to the emperor of Ethiopia. (236)
In discussing the Prester John legend, Purchas argues that his kingdom stretched from Nubia in the north to “that part where the Kingdome and Land of Manicongo lyeth,” cutting across the African continent “behind the Springs and Lakes of Nilus, going through the fierie and unknowne Countries.” He includes a detailed map of these boundaries, which encompass nearly a third of the African continent.

Purchas' synthesis of contemporaneous travel lore recalls Mandeville. Like its predecessor, Purchas His Pilgrimes was well-received in its time and remained influential for another century, most famously inspiring the landscape and opening lines of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." As he mentions in the well-known preface to Sybilline Leaves (1816), he fell asleep while reading Purchas, though the phrase ‘In Xanadu did Cublai Can build a stately palace" remained in his mind.
Queen Eleni's Letter of Prester John Queen Eleni's Letter of Prester John (1509)

This version of the letter, reportedly penned by Queen Helena (Eleni) of Ethiopia was delivered to King Manoel of Portgual in Lisbon in 1513. Curiously, it was written in Arabic and Persian; there is no evidence of a Portuguese copy despite, as Silverberg observes, the presumptive availability of Pêro da Covilhã's services.

It is collected in Damião de Góis' Legatio (1532).

As transcribed in Silverberg (p. 211), the queen writes:
In the name of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Three Persons, and One God, grace and blessing rest upon our beloved brother King Manoel, Rider of the Seas, Subjugator and Oppressor of infidels and Moslem unbelievers-- may the Lord Christ prosper you and give you victory over your foes. May He enlarge and extend your dominions through the intercession of those messengers of Christ, the four evangelists, John, Luke, Mark, Matthew, may their sanctity and prayers preserve you!

We would inform our beloved brother how two messengers arrived here from your great and lofty house. One was named Joao, who said he was a priest, and the other Joao Gomes. They said: we require provisions and men. We are therefore sending Matthew, our ambassador, with orders to reach one of your Indian ports and tell you that we can supply you with mountains of provisions, and men like unto the sands of the sea!

We have news that the Lord of Cairo is building ships to fight your fleet, and we shan give you so many men ... as to wipe the Moors from the face of the earth! We by land, and you, brothers, on the sea! ...

Now is the moment come for the fulfillment of the promise made by Christ and Holy Mary, His Mother, that in the last time there Would arise a king among the Franks who would make an end of all the Moors!

Everything that Matthew, our ambassador, may tell you, believe as from ourselves, for he is the best man that we have, and if we had another who knew or understood more than he we should have sent him. We would have entrusted our message to those of your subjects who came here, but we feared that they might not represent Our case as we desire.

With this ambassador, Matthew, we are sending a cross made of the wood of that on which Our Lord was crucified. It was brought me from Jerusalem, and I had two crosses made out of it, one for us, and the other one for you. 'ne sa id wood is black and has a little silver ring attached to it. We could have sent you much gold, but we feared that tlle Moors might steal it on the way.

If you are willing, we should be very glad to have your daughters in marriage for our sons, or-- better still-- if you would marry your sons to our daughters. With which no more, save tllat salvation and grace of Our Redeemer Christ and Our Lady the Holy Virgin rest on your estate, upon your sons and daughters, and on all your housel Amen. We moreover add that were we to muster all our people we could fill the world, but we have no power on the sea. May Christ Jesus help you, for certainly the things that you have done in India are miraculousl"
Samarkand An ancient city located on the old Silk Road in what is now eastern Uzbekistan, Samarkand long occupied a kind of middle trade space between China and the Mediterranean. Samarkand was an episcopal see of Nestorian Christianity at the time of the Letter's early transmission.

Samarkand is a curious inclusion in the Letter, given how unknown this city was to most medieval Europeans at the time. Silverberg (p. 49) notes that the Letter's mention of Samarkand marks the earliest known reference to the ancient city in a medieval European text, though the city was well known among Byzantines.

Interestingly, Samarkand was the site of early Prester John figure Yeh-lu Ta-shih's 1141 victory over the Persian Sultan Sanjar, the event recorded in Otto of Freising's Universal History that helped spawn the Prester John legend.
Yeh-lu Ta-shih The leader of the nomadic remnant of the Western Liao dynasty known as the Kara Khitai, Yeh-lü Ta-shi was one of the early historical personages misunderstood to be Prester John.

As Silverberg (p. 11) recalls, Yeh-lü Ta-shi was a descendent of the first Khitan Emperor of China. After escaping to central Asia in 1124 with about 200 followers following the collapse of the Liao Dynasty, Yeh-lü Ta-shi was able to establish a new kingdom by winning the support of local Turkish tribes. His 1141 victory over the Seljuk Turks was subsequently mistranslated into a victory of eastern Christians over a formidable Muslim army at a time when western Europe desperately needed a sign of hope after a streak of failed crusading ventures.

During this process of mistranslation, Yeh-lü Ta-shih morphed into an early model for later stories about Prester John. According to Hugh of Jabala's anecdote, recorded in Bishop Otto of Friesing's universal history, a certain Nestorian king called Presbyter Iohannes had defeated a large Muslim army in Ecbatana [note: this actually happened in Samarkand] and had plans to continue to Jerusalem, if not thwarted by an inability to cross the Tigris River. This story turned out to be a mutated retelling of lead of the Qara Khitai Yeh-lü Ta-shi's defeat of Seljuk Sultan Sanjar, though there are several important differences.

First, as Silverberg (pg. 12) points out, Yeh-lü Ta-shi was known to have received "a classical academic Chinese education" and is not known in any Chinese historical text to have been a Christian.

Second, Although he and his army did defeat the Seljuks in 1141, this battle occurred near Samarkand (modern Uzbekistan), not some 2,000 km west in Ecbatana (modern Iran), as Hugh of Jabala reports. Yeh-lü died in either 1143 or 1144 having not traveled much further west than Samarkand.
El Libro del Infante Dom Pedro
One of the most popular fictional narratives of the sixteenth century to feature Prester John, this highly romanticized account of the life and adventures of the Infante Dom Pedro, brother to Henry the Navigator, positions Dom Pedro as the mythic hero of Portugal's Age of Exploration. Silverberg (p. 231) calls this text "the last of the great Prester John tales."

While its author remains unknown, the book was originally printed in 1515 in Seville, though there is evidence to suggest that manuscript editions of the text circulated for some decades before. The text went through hundreds of editions from the sixteenth into the eighteenth century from Spanish and Portuguese presses.

The book is attributed to a man called Gómez de Santisteban, "one of the twelve that traveled with said prince." Given the Mandevillian tenor of the "travels" described within the book, it should not be presumed that this man was the book's actual author, though it is certainly possible.

The narrative takes Dom Pedro and his polyglot authorial companion from Castile to Norway to the Holy Land to Egypt, Arabia, and Mecca (where they witness Muhammad's floating coffin, a 12th century trope that parallels similar tales of St. Thomas). From there, the itinerary takes a more imaginative turn to the land of the Amazons, the home of Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and a land of giants called Luca, all of which are subject to the sovereignty of Prester John. Finally, they reach the city of Alves (also called 'Edicia'), the domain of Prester John himself, where Dom Pedro presents the priest king with a letter from the King of Castile.

From there, more familiar tropes from the Letter of Prester John are discussed, including the important link to St. Thomas. Here it is also made clear that Prester John is more of a title than an individual with new Prester Johns divinely chosen through a miracle performed by St. Thomas.

As the travelers ready themselves to return homeward, Prester John gives them a Letter to share with European Christians (a reduced form of the 'original' twelfth-century Letter), which the companions heroically carry back to Europe.

From Silverberg (226-7):
Pedro’s active career and tragic end stirred the European imagination: to those outside Portugal, knowing no details of the domestic political struggle, his downfall seemed like the toppling of a mythic hero, and swiftly the mythmaking began. His deeds were rehearsed by historians, they were dramatized by poets, and they passed into the oral tradition as folk legends. The aspect of Dom Pedro’s life that received the greatest embellishment was his grand tour of 1425-28, which became not merely a conventional trot through the capitals of Europe but, in some retellings, a splendid journey to the ends of the earth. The Book of the Infante Dom Pedro was the climactic work of this group.
...

The world of the Book of the Infante Dom Pedro is the familiar medieval fantasy world already well explored in the fancies of such writers as Mandeville. Beyond Christendom lies the Moslem world, and on the far side of that is a world of fables, inhabited by Amazons, the Lost Tribes of Israel, and Prester John… All the remote lands save Eden itself are under the sovereignty of Prester John, who here is as much a figure of legend as he ever was in the twelfth or thirteenth century. The author’s intent seems utopian and ecumenical; he implicitly criticizes the disunified world of Latin Christendom by showing the ideal community of Prester John’s land, where command of church and state is united in the person of the same benevolent autarch, and Christian justice and harmony are universally prevalent.
Read the account in English.
André Longjumeau André de Longjumeau was a Dominican missionary who led two missions to Güyük Khan in the mid-thirteenth century. His reports are a mixture of fact and fiction-- though William of Rubruck claimed that everything he heard from André de Longjumeau regarding the east was true.

André recorded his journey, which survives only in fragments collected by Joinville's Life of Saint Louis. There André describes a meeting with a “David,” a Kerait chieftain, whom he concludes has allied with a Mongol general in order to attack Muslims in Syria. For more on this journey, see Silverberg (pp. 105-39).
Faith, Religion, and Manners of the Ethiopians Published in 1540, the same year as the Jesuit order gained papal approval, serving as an update of Damião de Góis Legatio, this printed text represents Góis's efforts to provide more accurate information about Ethiopian Christianity, especially after the publication of Francisco Álvares' text on the Portuguese embassy to Ethiopia.

Góis had asked Saga za Ab, and Ethiopian monk stranded in Portugal, to compose an accurate depiction of Ethiopian Christianity, given the inaccuracies present in the Legatio, which drew largely on the accounts of Matthew of Armenia who, though an Ethiopian Christian, was non-native and a layperson. Saga za Ab completed his treatise in 1534, after which Góis translated it to Latin.

The text added a note on the etymology of Prester John as a title referring to the Ethiopian king, suggesting that "Prester" did not refer to "priest" but to "pretiosus," meaning "exalted." However, this is not the title that his subjects themselves used: Ethiopians used the Ge'ez or Amharic equivalents of exalted, being "encoe" and "belul," respectively. Accordingly, the text avers that Ethiopians called their king "Ioannes Belul" or Ioannes Encoe."

Although appreciated by the Erasmus-influenced intellectuals of the time, the text was banned by the Cardinal Infante Dom Henrique, Grand Inquisitor of Portugal for "implicitly advocat[ing] a kind of world-wide confederation of Christians" (Silverberg, 300). Instead of disseminating accurate information about the Ethiopian religion, Portuguese Jesuits returned to the earlier Portuguese imperative to convert Prester John, king of the Ethiopians, to Catholicism.

Still, the text was reprinted in Paris in 1541 and again in Louvain in 1544, and found itself translated into English and other languages. It remain banned in Portugal until 1791.
King Gundafor King Gundafor is the Indian King Thomas builds a palace in heaven for in The Acts of Thomas and is a figure mentioned in some interpolations of the Letter, in which John’s residence replicates exactly the spiritual palace Thomas builds for King Gundafor in the Acts of Thomas.

While the name "Gundafor" is not found in any other western text outside of The Acts of Thomas, Silverberg (p. 19) notes that archaeologists in the 19th century did find evidence supporting the historicity of this figure in the Indus valley: 1st century coins bearing the name "Gudaphora." Based on the numismatic evidence, historians have placed this king's reign as from 19-45 AD, coinciding with accounts of Thomas's missionary endeavors in India.

Prester John’s implicit Nestorianism, the legend’s dependence on the St. Thomas tradition, and the elements of the Letter reacting to the Islamic conception of paradise help establish a kind of hybrid or nomadic identity for John.

King Gundafor's Palace
James Bruce James Bruce (1730-1794) was a Scottish explorer and writer. He touches on the Prester John legend in his 1790 publication Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile.

Bruce arrives to Ethiopia a little more than a century after the European-Ethiopian project to find common ground against Islam had been abandoned. Although a few Europeans had visited or stumbled into Ethiopia in the interim, Bruce's visit was the most significant since Ethiopia had cast off Catholicism for good.

As Silverberg (p. 313) writes,
In 1769, there arrived the astonishing James Bruce. a towering Scot who had come looking for the source of the Blue Nile. His gift for languages, his phenomenal courage, and his fierce hatred of Catholicism... saw him safely through a two-year visit in which he became the confidant of the king and took part in an intricate civil war.
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.
Travels of Infante Dom Pedro of Portugal
Tratado da Virtuosa Benfeitoria (1433)

Infante Dom Pedro

From Silverberg (226-7):

Pedro’s active career and tragic end stirred the European imagination: to those outside Portugal, knowing no details of the domestic political struggle, his downfall seemed like the toppling of a mythic hero, and swiftly the mythmaking began. His deeds were rehearsed by historians, they were dramatized by poets, and they passed into the oral tradition as folk legends. The aspect of Dom Pedro’s life that received the greatest embellishment was his grand tour of 1425-28, which became not merely a conventional trot through the capitals of Europe but, in some retellings, a splendid journey to the ends of the earth. The Book of the Infante Dom Pedro was the climactic work of this group.
Its author is unknown, though there is some internal evidence that he was a priest. The book purports to be “written by Garci Ramirez de Santisteban, one of the twelve who traveled with said prince,” but since Dom Pedro did not in fact visit most of the places described by Garci Ramirez, it is clear that this ascription is merely a literary device. Though the publication of the work in printed form dated to 1515, it evidently circulated widely in manuscript for some time prior to that, perhaps for ten or even twenty years.
The world of the Book of the Infante Dom Pedro is the familiar medieval fantasy world already well explored in the fancies of such writers as Mandeville. Beyond Christendom lies the Moslem world, and on the far side of that is a world of fables, inhabited by Amazons, the Lost Tribes of Israel, and Prester John… All the remote lands save Eden itself are under the sovereignty of Prester John, who here is as much a figure of legend as he ever was in the twelfth or thirteenth century. The author’s intent seems utopian and ecumenical; he implicitly criticizes the disunified world of Latin Christendom by showing the ideal community of Prester John’s land, where command of church and state is united in the person of the same benevolent autarch, and Christian justice and harmony are universally prevalent” (226-7).
Read the account in English.
Manuel, Governor of the Romans The Letter here alludes to Manuel I Komnenus, the Byzantine Emperor. Calling him "governor" (Romeon gubernator) rather than "emperor" (Basileus ton Romeon) appears to be an insult.

Yet Silverberg (p. 47) points out that the term "governor" may have originated in one of the source texts for the Letter, Leo the Archpriest's work on Alexander the great, Historia de Proeliis, in which Alexander writes to his teacher Aristotle that declares to the latter that Ptolemy will be his "governor" upon the former's death.

The curious constituency the Letter names, "Romans," may allude to the Byzantines as the sole cultural inheritors of Rome or may refer to the manner in which Arab-speaking peoples of the twelfth century referred to all Christians as the "Rûm" during the Crusades.
Prester John Etymology There are a number of theories to explain how the name Prester John came to be associated with the Ethiopian king, among other personages.

According to SIlverberg (p. 319),
Explaining 'Prester' in a roundabout fashion still begged the question of the derivation of 'John,' unless one accepted the 1533 'gyam' etymology. Soon the 1533 explanation was confirmed by Portuguese returning from Ethiopia, who reported that the natives did indeed call their king by a title variously transcribed as 'jan,' 'gian,' or 'zan,' which meant "powerful" and was pronounced "zhan." That seemed to settle the issue. 'Jan Belul,' which could be translated as 'Precious John,' was the Ethiopian appelation of rank that had found its way into European tongues as "Prester John."
Pero Paez suggests instead that the Ethiopian king possibly became known as Prester John
due to the fact that as the Emperor is usually a deacon, some Greeks call in Presbyter, and then adding to this the title of 'zan,' which... is given to the Emperor, they came to say 'Preste zan, and foreigners, who are often wont to corrupt names... thus called him Prester John. This name Zan is of ancient usage in Ethiopia [and]... is still employed; for they speak of the officials of 'zan,' as we should say officials of the Emperor (qtd. in Silverberg, p. 319).

Manoel de Almeida begins his High History of Ethiopia or Abassia with a chapter called "The Name Prester John," in which he reports the familiar narrative that the title Prester John was misattributed to the Ethiopian King by Covilhã. As recorded in Silverberg (p. 320), Almeida notes that the name
was at first given to a Christian, but Nestorian, emperor who ruled in the interior of Asia. His ordinary name or title was Jonanam, derived from the prophet Jonah (this name has been erroneously changed by Europeans into John). THis name was common to the rulers of that monarchy as that of Pharaoh was to the Kings of Egypt. They called him Presbyter because of the cross that he always carried aloft before him, as among us Archbishops and Primates do.
Infante Dom Pedro The Infante Dom Pedro (1392-1449), Duke of Coimbra, and brother of Henry the Navigator, became the subject of legend.

Silverberg (p, 225) sums up the strange posthumous romanticization of Dom Pedro thusly:
Dom Pedro's itinerary, while wide-ranging, was... nothing extraordinary. Pedro himself, however, acquired a remarkable reputation in the later years of his life and afterward, becoming a symbol in Europe of fifteenth-century dynamism and brilliance. He was an active internationalist, maintaining contacts and serving, in a sense, as POrtugal's foreign minister during the closing years of his father's reign and in the reign of King Duarte, who succeeded in 1433. He provided encouragement and financial support for Prince Henry's explorations and worked with the Navigator toward the great portuguese goals of attaining the Indies and making contact with the legendary Christian monarch in Africa.
Dom Pedro is the subject of the extremely popular Spanish Book of the Infante Dom Pedro of Portugal, Who Traveled Over the Four Parts of the World, originally published in 1515 in Seville.
Samiardi Although initially unclear, the reference to this unfamiliar "Samiardi" must refer in some distorted way to the Seljuk Sanjar whose army was defeated at Qatawan (near Samarkand) by the somewhat Nestorian Kara Khitai in 1141.

The conflation that produced "Samiardi" from Sanjar has received multiple explanations by students of the Prester John legend.

Silverberg (p. 12) points out that some manuscripts of Otto's text use "Saniardi," a plural form of Sanjar, which, given the Seljuk custom of cooperative rule among brothers, provides a somewhat plausible explanation for the mutation "Samiardi."

Niayesh (p. 157) adds, "[a]s for the mysterious name of John's kingly adversaries, the 'Samiardi', it recalls the Persian 'Smerdis', name of the murdered brother of Cambyses, son and heir to Cyrus the Great." Given that Cyrus the Great destroyed Ecbatana, reputed site of the Christian victory over a Muslim army in Hugh of Jabala's narrative, nearly 1800 years before Hugh reports the battle there, Niayesh puzzles over the way that this version of Prester John "is made to fight the long extinct nations of the Medes and Assyrians, rather than directly facing contemporary 'Saracens.' "
Hugh of Jabala According Otto of Freising's Historia de duabus civitatibus, Hugh, Bishop of Jabala, a capable diplomat born in France but living in coastal Syria, traveled to western Europe at the request of Prince Raymond of Antioch in order to seek the support of Pope Eugenius III for a Second Crusade.

In the years preceding this visit, Hugh had "fought the attempts of the Emperor of Byzantium to gain power over the various Crusader principalities" (Silverberg, 3).
Embassy of David, King of Ethiopia, to the Most Holy Pope Our lord Clement VII Published in 1533 in Bologna, this short text mainly recounts Francsico Álvares' report about his Ethiopian travels to Pope Clement VII.

In its supplementary material, this text suggests that the Ethiopian king "is not called by them Prester John (as the masses falsely believe) but Gyam, which in their language means 'powerful, for he is in truth most powerful" (qtd. in Silverberg, p. 318).
Ivané (John) Orbelian From Silverberg (p. 14):
In 1876 the Russian scholar Philipp Bruun published a work entitled The Migrations of Prester John, in which he challenged the whole notion that Bishop Hugh's story was a distorted version of the exploits of Yeh·lu Ta-shih. According to Bruun, the prototype of Prester John was the general Ivané (John) Orhelian, commander-in-chief of the army of the kingdom of Georgia. This John Orhelian is One of his f country's national heroes, who fought valiantly for many years to drive the Turks from the Caucasus. In 1123-24 he recaptured from the Seljuks a wide strip of territory in eastern Georgia, including the cities of Tiflis and Ani, and his grateful monarch, King David the Restorer, bestowed on him large grants of land in the reconquered region.
Bruun raised the interesting point that Otto of Freising apparently confused the Georgian city of Ani with the old Persian city of Ecbatana. In a passage of Otto's chronicle somewhat earlier than the Prester John anecdote, Otto, in providing some geographical information apparently received from Bishop Hugh, remarked, "The kings of the Persians ... . have themselves established the seat of their kingdom at Ecbatana, which ... in their tongue is called Rani." The defeat of the Seljuks at Ani in 1123 thus begins to seem a more plausible source for Prester John's victory at Ecbatana than does the triumph of Yeh-lü Ta-shih outside Samarkand. Moreover, John Orbelian was a Christian-- Greek Orthodox, though, and not Nestorian. And, though he was neither a king nor a priest, the Georgian general did conduct himself in regal fashion: he dined on silver dishes, had the privilege of sitting on a couch at royal banquets while the other princes sat merely on cushions, and the Orbelian family held the hereditary right to provide over the cornations of Georgian kings.
Ethiopian Ambassador Matthew A figure of some mystery and much ill fortune, the man simply known as Matthew in several Portuguese travel accounts suffered terrible treatment as the Ethiopian ambassador sent by Queen Eleni to the Portuguese King Manoel.

Silverberg (p. 212) describes him thusly:
This Matthew, Queen Eleni's ambasssador, is a figure of some mystery. According to one report, he was a Christian merchant from Armenia; according to another, the brother of the Coptic Patriarch of Egypt, and the husband of a kinswoman of Prester John; a third stor had it that he was a recent conver from Islam. Much of this may have been true. ALl that is certain is that he was lighter in color than an Ethiopian, middle-aged, and of distinguished bearing.