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

Salvadore book

Matteo Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402-1555. London: Routledge, 2016.

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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.”
Liber Peregrinationis Jacapo da Verona's Liber Peregrinationis (1335) records the first extant textual mention of Prester John's kindgdom in Ethiopia (Giovanni da Carignano's map represents the first European representation of Prester John in Europe).

As Salvadore (p. 5) translates, Jacapo, returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, writes that
They are black Ethiopians from among the people of Prester John, who is one of the greatest princes in the world. Those Nubians sing for the whole day and the whole night. They consecrate fermented bread... They always carry... a cross in their hand, even in the presence of the Sultan and in the presence of the Saracens, and they pay no tribute through the entire land of the Sultan. Also... Prester John, the lord of Nubia and Ethiopia, has the potential within his own real to divert the Nile River... If that land did not receive this river it would be wholly uninhabitable, as evidently [is the case for] all of Egypt; and, similarly, Prester John is more powerful than the Sultan.
The full account can be found in Jacopo da Verona. Liber peregrinationis. Edited by Ugo Monneret de Villard. Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1950
Giovanni da Carignano Born in Genoa, Giovanni da Carignano (1250-1329) was a rector and later a priest turned famed cartographer. He is known as the first European to accurately plot Ethiopia on a map, as well as the first European to locate the kingdom of Prester John in Ethiopia. Additionally, he is famous for providing the only historical evidence of the 1306 Ethiopian mission that arrived in Rome.

Carignano produced a portolan chart and commentary, both of which are now lost, the former more recently than the latter. Carignano's lost portolan map, which survives only in pre-WWII photographs, is signed "Presbiter Johannes Rector sancti Marci de portu Ianue me fecit."

Salvadore (p. 1) notes that his appointment in 1291 to the position of rector at San Marco al Molo, located in the Madraccio, Genoa's old port, provided Giovanni with a congregation of mercantile seafarers who likely shared stories of their travels.

of the San Marco Church in Genoa.
Pope Nicholas V's Letter to Prester John Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455) entrusted the Franciscan Ludovico da Bologna to organize a mission to deliver a letter to Zar'a Yaqob, understood as Prester John.

As Salvadore (p. 65) explains, "the document, dated 1 December 1456, speaks to the anxieties reigning over the Church and, more generally, the European establishment-- anxieties that also explain the renewed interest in Ethiopia." Here the Pope employs time-honored crusading rhetoric and the familiar call to divert the Nile River in hopes to render the Ethiopian-European connection into something potent and durable:
Immediately after leaving the conclave [8 April 1455], our soul oppressed by the fall and misfortune of Constaninople [1453] we made a vow to embark on a war against the Turks, to those who are iniquitous usurpers of Christian lands. Therefore, given that our funds are not enough, we decided to gather the armies of all the pirnces of the arth who profess the religion of Jesus Crucified-- you among them.... Between Westerners and Easterners, we have organized two good armies of land and sea, of sufficient valor.... we plan to add to the enterprise your important cooperation, with which we will have enough strength no only to defeat the unholy Turk, but to take away from the infidel the holy land of Jerusalem.... Because God wanted you to have, under your sublime rule, a powerful army, the river Nile whose inundations fertilize the land where our enemies feed and you at your own pleasure can take that away from them.
Salvadore (p.66) adds that this letter is particularly notable for being the first explicit "call to arms" sent to the Ethiopian ruler, the presumed Prester John.
Alessandro Zorzi Of Allesandro Zorzi, Salvadore writes (p. 30):
Eight decades after Fra Mauro drew his Mappaemundi, a Venetian erudite by the name of Alex Zorzi started to collect information about the overseas; however, unlike a monk, he did not turn the information he collected into maps, nor would he enjoy much fame. Instead, he simply left behind itineraries and cartographical sketches of disparate faraway places and proto-ethnographic information that remained unpublished until modern times. Zorzi assembled explorers dispatched back to Europe from the least-known corners of the earth, and eyewitness accounts of visitors to Venice. His efforts resulted in two collections, one regarding the New World and the other regarding the Old World. The latter included a section on the African continent and the Muslim world in which, along with previously published travelogues of more renowned travelers of the time, one can find eight itineraries dedicated to Ethiopia's connection to the Holy Land.
Cardinal Guillaume Fillastre Cardinal Guillaume Fillastre (1344-1428), based in Rome mentions Ethiopian Emperor Yeshaq's embassy to the court King Afonso V of Aragon in his annotations to Ptolemy's Geography. As Salvadore (p. 40) translates,
Two ambassadors of Prester John, one Christian and the other infidel came to Alfonso king of Aragon in the year of our Lord 1427."
...
Christians of Prester John, who is said to reign over seventy-two kings, of which twelve are infidels, the rest Christians yet different in rituals and mores. Little is known of [what is] beyond the equator with the exception of the great region of Agisimba [Abyssinia], which is included in this map and drawn at the south end.