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

William of Rubruck

Born in Flanders, William of Rubruck (1220-1293) was perhaps the most memorable of the Franciscan monks who traveled to the Mongol empire in the middle of the thirteenth century. His Itinerarium influenced a number of subsequent texts.

While accompanying King Louis IX of France in Constantinople during the Seventh Crusade (1248-1254), William was commissioned to travel east in order to convert the Tatars to Christianity. Specifically, William was tasked with investigating rumors of Nestorian Christians among the Mongol cities.

Following the route of fellow Franciscan missionary-adventurer John of Plano Carpini, William reached Mongolia in December 1253 and met with Möngke Khan. His entire journey took three years. Upon returning to the West, William presented King Louis with the Itinerarium, a carefully observed ethnography which records the nuances of Mongol culture and geography, and also offers an account of the journey itself.

View an annotated map of William's travels created by students from Washington & Lee University.

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Travels of William of Rubruck
Itinerarium fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis de ordine fratrum Minorum, Galli, Anno gratia 1253 ad partes Orientales (c. 1253-1255)

William of Rubruck's Itinerarium records the Franciscan missionary's quest, ordered by King Louis IX, to convert the Tatars to Christianity and to gauge their potential as crusading allies.

Like John of Plano Carpini's Ystoria Mongalorum, William's Itinerarium records basic observations about the geography, culture, religion, and daily life of the Mongols. William's account has been more historically useful due to his incisive observations and his clear writing style. As Brewer (p. 162) notes, William was the first European to cast doubt on the veracity of the Prester John legends, though he does buy into Prester John's historical reality.

In Chapter 17 William writes of a powerful Naiman (Nestorian) shepherd who rose to power as King John at the beginning of the twelfth century during the power vacuum created by the death of the "Gürkhan." William is careful to note that the rumors that began to spread about this King John are exaggerations.

From Dawson’s English translation (122-23):
In a certain plain among these pasture lands [of the Carcathayans] was a Nestorian, a mighty shepherd and lord of all the people called Naimans, who were Nestorian Christians. On the death of Coir Chan, this Nestorian set himself as king and the Nestorians called him King John, and they used to tell of him ten times more than the truth. For the Nestorians coming from these parts do this kind of thing-- out of nothing they make a great rumour… I passed through his pasture lands and nobody knew anything about him with the exception of a few Nestorians.
[...]
This John had a brother by the name of Unc, like him a mighty shepard, and he was beyond the pastures of these Carcathayans, separated from his brother by a distance of three weeks’ journey, and he was lord of a little town called Caracorum,... King John died without an heir and his brother Unc grew rich and had himself called Chan and used to send his herds and flocks as far as the Mongol boundaries… And the Tartars and Mongols made him their leader and captain.”

See also this useful online article on William and his travels.
More on William of Rubruck.
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.
Ong Khan
Ong Khan, alternately known as Unc Khan, Toghril, Tooril Khan, Unach, King David, and King John was the Khereid ruler in the late 12th/early 13th centuries. The title ong is the Mongol form of the Chinese honorific wang meaning 'universal' (Hamilton, p. 248).

Reportedly a Nestorian Christian– although according to Bar Hebraeus' Chronicon Syriacum, a lapsed one– "Unach" Khan was killed by his blood brother and subordinate, the soon-to-be Genghis Khan, who was acting on rumors that a jealous Unc was planning to kill him.

This is the same figure known in other mid-thirteenth century texts as King David, son of Prester John.

Ong Khan figures in a number of Prester John narratives, including the Historia Tartarum (c. 1246), William of Rubruck's Itinerarium (c. 1253), the Chronicon Syriacum, Marco Polo's Travels,

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