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

Simon of St. Quentin and Ascelin of Lombardia

In 1245, Dominican friars Simon of St. Quentin (fl. 1246-1249) and Ascelin of Lombardia traveled to the Mongol empire as an embassy sent by Pope Innocent IV.

See their History of the Tartars, which was composed by Simon in 1246. Much of this account is lost; what we know if it survives in Vincent of Beauvais' Speculum Historiale.

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European Contact with the Mongol Empire On his pilgrimage from Spain to the Holy Land, Benjamin of Tudela (c. 1165) described an encounter with powerful Eastern king, called Kofar-al-Turak, increasing Western interest in the Mongols but hardly shedding light on the Prester John legend. By 1241 groups of Mongol warriors had traveled across the Asian Steppe and entered into Poland, Hungary, and the Danube Valley. Half a decade later, eastbound travelers returned to the Latin West with even more first-hand intelligence about the Mongols whom the crusading advocates of the previous century had fleshed out into the fiction of Prester John.

Already in 1245, Innocent IV had sent Franciscan John of Plano Carpini to the East to deliver letters to the Mongol khan, inviting the khan to embrace Christianity. The resulting journey, the most widely known of all early Western accounts with Mongols, describes “Ethiopians” from the lands of Prester John: here John has already lost his place at the head of Eastern politics.

Prester John plays no part in John's mission to guarantee cooperation from the Great Khan. Later narratives, including those of Ascelin of Lombardia (1245-48) , André de Longjumeau (1249), Joinville’s Chronicle, and John Mandeville allude to a union between these Mongols and Prester John. John of Monte Corvino (c. 1294) brought back a more reliable account of Indian Christians than had been circulating previously in the West but does not explicitly mention Prester John. Other travelers, including William of Rubruck (c. 1253), Marco Polo (c. 1269-99), and Odoric of Pordenone (1320s) attempt to rationalize the assumptions regarding a kingdom of Prester John as fantastical extrapolations of minor Eastern truths.

Even when these writers undercut some of the splendor of John’s kingdom, they keep him alive figuratively and literally. To ally Prester John with the Mongols may seem like a threat to the legend’s persistence, but in fact these travelers were updating the legend of Prester John by integrating John into the genealogy of an Eastern people foremost in the minds of Western leaders since the mid-thirteenth century. Even as some writers describe the legend as an exaggeration, their authority is restricted by the fact that none of these travelers claimed to have met the enigmatic figure.
History of the Tartars
Historia Tartarum (c. 1246)

Most of Ascelin’s journey to the land of the Tartars is lost, but that which remains, recorded by Simon of Saint-Quentin, was kept alive by Vincent of Beauvais in his Speculum Historiale.

As Morgan (p. 164) relates, "Simon had evidently picked up the story of Toghril's defeat at the hands of Chinggis Khan, and his subsequent death. For him, though, Chinggis's defeated enemy remains King David, son of Prester John, king of India."

In the portion of the narrative that survives (that which was transcribed by Vincent of Beauvais), Ascelin also reports that Prester John has integrated his family into the Mongol royal family by betrothing Prester John’s granddaughter to Chinggis Khan.

For more on Simon’s text and journey, see Guzman and Brewer (pp. 155-159).
Mirror of History
Speculum Historiale (1256-1269)

One of the great encyclopedic works of the Middle Ages, Vincent of Beauvais' Speculum contains a large chunk of the otherwise lost 1246 account of Simon of St. Quentin's and Ascelin of Lombardia's mission to the Mongols in 1245.

From Guzman (footnote 11 on pg 233):
"Vincent, copying from Simon of Saint-Quentin, records the popular rumor that Chinggis Khan married the daughter of King David, son of Prester John, and that the mother of Ogodei Khan was thus a Christian. This and the factors mentioned above led to numerous rumors of the Khan’s imminent conversion.”
To read the relevant portion of Vincent's Speculum Historiale in an English translation, see Book 32, chapters 2-52.