Three Magi
In 1158, one year after Otto completed his Historia, Frederick Barbarossa “found” three bodies in Milan, which were verified to be those of the Magi. Prior to this moment, little was known about these peripheral figures. Prior to the twelfth century, interest in the Magi was primarily restricted to the iconography of the Nativity. Little was known about these Eastern figures.
Since their original appearance in the New Testament's various accounts of Jesus' birth, the Magi had subsequently undergone an imaginative transformation. In Matthew and Luke, the three wise men appear to be no more than Persian astrologers, but because the Old Testament books of Isaiah and the Psalms speak of foreign kings paying homage to the Messiah, by as early as the sixth century both popular and learned Christian traditions had promoted the Magi to the status of kings.
(Baldridge, 9)
Just as a competent Eastern Christian priest-king helped strengthen Frederick’s own position in the West, so too did a materially verifiable trace of the Magi enhance the Emperor’s claim to authority. The relics of these Magi were transferred to Cologne in 1164 and Barbarossa’s anti-pope canonized Charlemagne at Aachen one year later. Thus, in a period of two years, the Emperor helped create a cult of Christian kingship by creating two separate shrines to secular power. When, during such chaos, the Prester John Letter appears, it is quite curious that John’s existence is described in terms of his genealogical relation to the very same Magi whose Western significance was actively being codified in Germany.
Through Biblical commentaries (and a shared, misunderstood geography), the Magi had also become associated with the Apostle Thomas. As Bernard Hamilton notes (p. 237), "[m]ost educated people in twelfth-century western Europe believed that the Apostles had literally carried out the Lord’s command and preached the Gospel to all nations," with Thomas, that figure most tethered to Prester John, charged with India and other parts East. Later John of Hildesheim makes this connection between the Magi and the Apostle Thomas explicit, noting that the former were converted by the latter, and when the Magi died they selected a "Prester John" to rule over their lands.
