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

Zara Yaqob

Brooks describes the gradual process that brought awareness of Zara Yaqob to Europe (p. 73):

Accounts of the material wealth, spiritual piety, and political strength of Zar’a Yaqob must certainly have spread northward up the Nile River and along established trading routes with merchants and travelers. Fifteenth-century accounts demonstrated an increasing tendency toward locating Prester John in Abyssinia, and this was especially the case with the Portuguese.

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Annales Omnium Temporum In a chronicle (w. 1407-1450) attributed to Pietro Ranzano, the author describes meeting a fellow Italian, Pietro Rombulo, who claimed to have spent 37 years at the courts of two Ethiopian neguses: Yeshaq and Zara Yaqob.

In relating his history there, Rombulo claims that Prester John is associated with the rulers of China. Brewer (p. 284) mentions this narrative in his table of Prester John texts.

Of the text, Verena Krebs writes (p. 113):
While Pietro Ranzano had interrogated the Ethoiopian ambassador Pietro Rombulo about Ethiopia in 1450 and included much factual information on Ethiopia in his Annales omnium temporum, he also could not resist the urge to embellish the account with descriptions of immense wealth, precious stones, gold, many tributary kings, exotic partially fictitious animals, and an all-powerful Christian army of a massive size, clearly drawing on contemporary views of Prester John.

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Michael Brooks