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, evangelized by St. Bartholomew
- Lesser India: north of subcontinent, focused around the Indus River, evangelized by St. Thomas
- 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, evangelized by St. Matthew
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).
Relaño summarizes the concept thusly (p.53);
According to Armondo Cortesão, the term three Indies appeared for the first time in a manuscript by Guido of Pisa (c. 1118). The concept may thus have been fairly new when the letter of Prester John was written, although the use of India Major (or Magna) an India Minor was certainly much older. The tripartite division of India enjoyed thereafter a wide acceptance... The precise geographical coverage of each part, however, is never fully defined. From one author to another, their extent is somewhat variable. Occasionally, they can even be contradictory. This fact notwithstanding, Lesser India would normally embrace Mackran and the coast below the Indus as far as some point immediately north of Malabar. Greater India used to include the southern half of the Hindustan Peninsula, extending then eastwards to the Ganges and beyond without any clear end. Finally, Middle India was almost unanimously thought to cover eastern Africa.
For an exhaustive study of medieval geography and the myths that influenced it, see John Kirtland Wright, especially pp. 155-60.
