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

Seljuk Turks

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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.
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.' "
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.