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

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.

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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.
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.
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.
A Collection of Curious Travels and Voyages John Ray (1627-1705) penned this imaginative travelogue, clearly inspired by Mandeville, in 1693. In discussing Prester John, Ray asserts that the priest king sent griffins from his home in Africa to the Persian king in order to seek a military alliance against the Turks.
The Garden of Curious Flowers
Spanish writer Antonio de Torquemada (1507-1569) wrote The Garden of Curious Flowers at the end of his life, and the text was published posthumously in 1573. Written in Spanish and translated into English, French, and Italian, the University of Notre Dame Rare Books and Specialty Collections describes the text as a "miscellaneous book in six treatises on general matters, social recommendations, popular science and superstitions." Among those "superstitions" is a treatement of Prester John, in which Torquemada uses the accounts of Marco Polo and John Mandeville to argue against, in the form of a Socratic dialogue, the contemporary habit of situating Prester John in Ethiopia.

Among other arguments, Torquemada uses his character Anthonio to affirm Prester John's real name as "Belulgian," roots Prester John in the St. Thomas apocrypha (here the director successor of the Apostle), and that because of Mandeville and Polo it is known that "Prester lohn is not hee which is in Aethiopia but he who was in the Oriental Indies, and that he name giuen vnto him of Aethiopia, was but through error, & because the people would haue it to be so" (qtd. in Brewer, p. 224).

Miguel de Cervantes criticizes this text in his Don Quixote, including it among the books considered untruthful enough to warrant burning:
"Who is that tub there?" said the curate.
"This," said the barber, "is 'Don Olivante de Laura.'"
"The author of that book," said the curate, "was the same that wrote 'The Garden of Flowers,' and truly there is no deciding which of the two books is the more truthful, or, to put it better, the less lying; all I can say is, send this one into the yard for a
swaggering fool."
The Antipodes Richard Brome Caroline-era play The Antipodes, which draws heavily on The Book of John Mandeville, includes a speech that touches on the Prester John legend:
He talks much of the Kingdom of Cathay,
Of one great Khan, and goodman Prester John,
(Whatever they be), and says that khan’s a clown
unto the John he speaks of. And that John
dwells up almost at Paradise. But sure his mind
is in a wilderness: For there he says
are Geese that have two heads a piece, and hens
that bear more wool upon their backs than sheep.”

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