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

Wolfram von Eschenbach

Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1160-c.1220), a German knight, poet, and Minnesinger, was the author of Parzival, the most celebrated medieval German Arthurian romance.

Parzival, which treats the legend of the Holy Grail, is full of narrative asides that have often been understood by literary historians as clues to Wolfram's personality.

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Parzival Parzival (1197-1215)

Written in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival offers readers the most elaborate medieval presentation of the Grail legend of the time. Framed as something of a rejoinder to Chrétien de Troyes’s incomplete Perceval, Wolfram’s narrative follows an enigmatic (likely invented) source, Kyot, through whom the reader is granted access to the “heathen” Arabic material essential to the story of the Grail that was absent in Chrétien's tale.

Among Wolfram’s inventions to the narrative is the inclusion of Feirefiz the pagan half-brother to Parzival, an equal in knightly virtue and ability and distinguished primarily by his mottled black and white skin. Feirefiz, who falls in love with the Grail’s maiden, Repanse de Schoye, decides to accept baptism in order to be closer to his love, an act that also allows him to see the Grail. Soon after, Parzival decides to pass the Grail onto Feirefiz, who marries the Grail maiden, returns to the East to preach Christianity, and gives birth to a son, the future keeper of the Grail. That son is Prester John, whose name thereafter becomes the official title of Indian kings. The story of this Prester John is continued in Albrecht von Scharfenberg's sequel/prequel Der jüngere Titurel.

Parzival and Feirefiz (MS Cgm 19, folio 49v, State Library, Munich)

Wolfram writes (pp. 344-45):
[Repanse de Schoye] gave birth… in India, to a son, who was called Johan. Prester John they called him; forever they retained that name for the kings there. Feirefiz had letters sent all over the land of India, telling them about the Christian way of life.

In Parzival, Wolfram not only incorporates Prester John into Arthurian lore, he consequently builds John into English history. Prester John becomes a distant descendent of Parzival, himself a distant descendent of Arthur, and yet Wolfram also maintains John’s uncanny, hybrid status in the minds of his readers. As the son of the mottled Feirefiz, Wolfram’s Prester John is himself marked, genealogically and physically, as simultaneously European and Other. Yet while the text integrates John into the Matter of England, Parzival makes no explicit reference to the legend of Prester John. Rather than accrete onto what is already a dense historical tradition, Wolfram connects the two worlds, un-knowing the Prester John legend in order to begin a tradition that might better amplify John’s relevance to Wolfram’s audience.

Brewer sees Parzival as a transition point for the legend (p.22):
Prester John plays a minor role in the story, appearing as a man, the son of the grail maiden Repanse and the half-Saracen Feirefiz, but a man whose name subsequently became the title for a line of kings descended from the original man named Prester John. Although Parzival is a fictional text, this remark represents a conceptual transition in the understanding of 'Prester John.' While earlier writers thought of Prester John as a single man and later writers thought of Prester John as a title, Wolfram von Eschenbach saw him as encapsulating both.

Read Jessie L. Wetson’s 1912 English translation of Parzival:

For more on Parzival
Early Literary and Political Reverberations
In the half-century that followed the appearance of the letter, interest in Prester John increased steadily, most visibly through the transmission and translation of the Letter, which was translated into the vernacular by the end of the twelfth century.

Several chronicles composed before 1200, including Geoffrey of Breuil's Chronica, Roger of Howden's Gesta Regis Henrici II et Ricardi I, and Annales Colonienses Maximi, along with other "historical" texts such as Gerald of Wales' De Vita Galfridi contain some mention of either the figure or letter of Prester John, suggesting that this text was quickly transmitted and taken literally.

This is not the say that the Letter's early readers understood the figure of Prester John the same way. While Geoffrey of Breuil comments that Prester John was given his name due to his humility, Gerald of Wales relates an argument in which one party was accused of being "so prideful and arrogant he was like Prester John" (Brewer, 274). Even from its beginnings, it seems, this legend meant everything to everyone.

This first wave of popularity evidently reached Pope Alexander III, who crafted a reply to the eastern priest-king. Evidently, Pope Alexander sent his personal physician, Master Phillip, as envoy to seek Prester John's kingdom and to deliver this reply, which urged John's instruction in Catholicism. We never hear back from Master Phillip.
While Alexander’s letter is typically read at face-value, it also has the effect of re-inscribing ecclesiastical power, in the form of doctrinal Catholicism, as the most important feature of any imperial project. Hamilton reads the letter as a kind of public rhetorical performance, a stance he supports by noting that Alexander made several copies of his letter.

This rhetorical reflexivity became a trademark feature found in a number of adaptations of the legend Wolfram von Eschenbach provides the first fully literary account of Prester John when he integrates the legendary ruler into the genealogy of Arthurian romance.
Among the early adaptations of the legend, the most impactful was John's role as prophesied savior for the Fifth Crusade. Although the legend was birthed through a letter addressed to Western rulers written between the Second and Third Crusades, there were no attempts to invoke John during the third or fourth crusades.

During the Fifth Crusade, Prester John returns. The figure of Prester John becomes entangled with that of a figure called "King David" and the epistolary genre that birthed the legend gives way to the genre of prophecy. Leaders of the crusade, including Jacques of Vitry, predict the arrival of a Prester John figure who would help defeat Islam once and for all. These prophecies found their way into several chronicles before and after the Crusade, the pertinent details of which are recorded on the following pages.

Of course, Prester John did not arrive, and the Europeans ceded their advantage and were summarily defeated. The disastrous end to the Fifth Crusade illustrates the imprint the legend of Prester John had made on Europe, even within the first fifty years of the letter's circulation.

The following two pages provide a visualization of this early spread of the legend.