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

Three Indias

According to the Letter of Prester John, "Our magnificence dominates the Three Indias, and our land extends from farthest India, where the body of St. Thomas the Apostle rests, to the place where the sun rises, and returns by slopes to the Babylonian Desert near the Tower of Babel."

Much has been written on the vast (and vague) geography that composed the region known to Europeans as India in the Middle Ages.

The three medieval “Indias” consisted of:

Greater India: southern and coastal Indian subcontinent and areas east
Lesser India: north of subcontinent, focused around the Indus River
Middle India / Third India: Ethiopia/Abyssinia and portions of Persia and Media—sometimes the area between the Nile and the Red Sea, the very region from which the first news of Prester John reportedly arrived

Altogether, "India" could denote any land east of the Nile and west of Cathay. It is not surprising then that the term "India" was often meant to conjure the idea of vast eastern, non-Christian space.

Hamilton points out that earlier writers had already subdivided Middle India in three types of Ethiopians, one of which being Indians, exemplified by Gervase of Tilbury (1150-1220) in his encyclopedic Otia Imperiali (b. 1220).

For an exhaustive study of medieval geography and the myths that influenced it, see John Kirtland Wright, especially pp. 155-60.

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The Two Cities, A Chronicle of Universal History De Duabus Civitatibus (1157-1158)

Inspired by civil unrest in Germany and written shortly after the fall of Edessa in 1143, Otto of Freising's Historia de duabus civitatibus has come to be known for providing an important early source on the figure of Prester John.

Oddly enough, this vital information is nothing more than an a recorded anecdote from 1145 that tells of a colleague of Otto's called Hugh of Jabala, a bishop from Lebanon, who was relaying news of a promising Nestorian Christian prince, Iohannes. This news as given in the presence of Pope Eugenius III at Viterbo.

According to Otto, widely reputed to be a trustworthy historian, this Iohannes, hailing from the distant East of the Magi, had recently conquered Persia and headed West to assist crusaders in their defense of the Holy Land. Unfortunately, Otto relates, a flooded Tigris River prevented him from aiding his Latin Christian brethren. As summarized by Slessarev (27-28):
He [i.e. Hugh] related also that not many years before a certain John, a king and priest who dwells beyond Persia and Armenia in the uttermost East and, with all his people, is a Christian but a Nestorian, made war on the brother kings of Persians and Medes, called Samiardi, and stormed Ekbatana (the seat of their kingdom).

When the aforesaid kings met him with an army composed of Persians, Medes and Assyrians a battle ensued which lasted for three days, since both parties were willing to die rather than turn in flight. Prester John, for so they are accustomed to call him... emerged victorious.

He said that after this victory the aforesaid John moved his army to the aid of the Church in Jerusalem. But that when he had reached the river Tigris and was unable to transport his army across that river by any evidence he turned towards the north... tarried there for several years... [and] was forced to return home.”

In analyzing the anecdote that arguably sparked the Prester John fever across Europe, Niayesh (p. 157) notes the structural "ambivalence" of Hugh's account, noting that his story was "caught half-way between the pagan past of classical authorities and the present of Christian Crusaders" insofar as Prester John is "made to fight the long extinct nations of the Medes and Assyrians, rather than directly facing contemporary 'Saracens.'

Even the somewhat contemporaneous historical details do not, in actuality, herald a Christian savior of western Europe. Although this rumor spawned the centuries-long belief in an Eastern potentate capable of uniting Christendom, the initial account of an Eastern anti-Islamic leader was later understood to refer to the deeds of the Qara Khitai, a nomadic Chinese tribe descending from Manchuria. Significantly, this battle took place in Samarkand, not Ecbatana, as Hugh reports.

Nevertheless, despite historical mistranslation and Iohannes's failure to reach even Byzantium, this rumor helped set in motion, for many Europeans, a belated recognition of the world beyond the Tigris.

Brewer edits and translates the relevant passages of the chronicle (pp. 43-45).

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