Prester John
Stories popular in Europe in the 12th to the 17th centuries told of a Nestorian patriarch and king who was said to rule over a Christian nation lost amid the pagans and Muslims in the Orient.
[1]: 28 The accounts were often embellished with various tropes of medieval popular fantasy, depicting Prester John as a descendant of the Three Magi, ruling a kingdom full of riches, marvels, and strange creatures.
After the coming of the Mongols to the Western world, accounts placed the king in Central Asia, and eventually Portuguese explorers came to believe that the term was a reference to Ethiopia, by which time it had been an isolated Christian "exclave" distant from any other Christian-ruled territory.
This text inculcated in Westerners an image of India as a place of exotic wonders and offered the earliest description of Saint Thomas establishing a Christian sect there, motifs that loomed large over later accounts of Prester John.
[5] Additionally, the tradition may have drawn from the shadowy early Christian figure John the Presbyter of Syria, whose existence is first inferred by the ecclesiastical historian and bishop Eusebius of Caesarea based on his reading of earlier church fathers.
[9][10] Later accounts of Prester John borrowed heavily from literary texts concerning the East, including the great body of ancient and medieval geographical and travel literature.
What is certain is that German chronicler Otto of Freising reported in his Chronicon of 1145 that the previous year he had met Hugh, bishop of Jabala in Syria, at the court of Pope Eugene III in Viterbo.
[14][15][16] Hugh was an emissary of Prince Raymond of Antioch, sent to seek Western aid against the Saracens after the Siege of Edessa; his counsel inspired Eugene to call for the Second Crusade.
Hugh told Otto, in the presence of the pope, that Prester John, a Nestorian Christian who served in the dual position of priest and king, had regained the city of Ecbatana from the brother monarchs of Media and Persia, the Samiardi, in a great battle "not many years ago".
[17] Robert Silverberg connects this account with historic events of 1141, when the Qara Khitai khanate under Yelü Dashi defeated the Seljuk Turks in the Battle of Qatwan, near Samarkand.
It is possible Otto recorded Hugh's confused report to prevent complacency in the Crusade's European backers – according to his account, no help could be expected from a powerful Eastern king.
[18] An epistolary wonder tale with parallels suggesting its author knew the Romance of Alexander and the above-mentioned Acts of Thomas, the Letter was supposedly written to the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus by Prester John, descendant of one of the Three Magi and King of India.
In 1221, Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Acre, returned from the disastrous Fifth Crusade with good news: King David of India, the son or grandson of Prester John, had mobilized his armies against the Saracens.
Belief that a lost Nestorian kingdom existed in the east, or that the Crusader states' salvation depended on an alliance with an Eastern monarch, was one reason for the numerous Christian ambassadors and missionaries sent to the Mongols.
Fairly truthful chroniclers and explorers such as Marco Polo,[31] Crusader-historian Jean de Joinville,[32] and the Franciscan voyager Odoric of Pordenone[33]: 244–247 stripped Prester John of much of his otherworldly veneer, portraying him as a more realistic earthly monarch.
Odoric places John's land to the west of Cathay en route to Europe, and identifies its capital as "Cosan", variously interpreted by translators as a number of names and locations.
[33]: 245–246 Joinville describes Genghis Khan in his chronicle as a "wise man" who unites all the Tartar tribes and leads them to victory against their strongest enemy, Prester John.
Bruun in 1876, who suggested that Prester John might be found among the kings of Georgia, which, at the time of Crusades, experienced military resurgence challenging the Muslim power.
[40]: 184 The connection with Georgia is unlikely, considering that country was Orthodox, rather than Nestorian, and due to the fact that it and its predecessor states Colchis/Lazica and Iberia were well known and documented at the time, with Episcopoi of Kartli having regular epistolary conversions with Bishops of Rome.
[42] On 7 May 1487, two Portuguese envoys, Pêro da Covilhã and Afonso de Paiva, were sent traveling secretly overland to gather information on a possible sea route to India, but also to inquire about Prester John.
As a result of this mission, and facing Muslim expansion, regent queen Eleni of Ethiopia sent ambassador Mateus to king Manuel I of Portugal and to the pope, in search of a coalition.
In a footnote to this passage, Richard Pankhurst states that this is apparently the first recorded statement by an Ethiopian monarch about this tale, and they were likely unaware of the title until Prutky's inquiry.
[55] Seventeenth-century academics like German orientalist Hiob Ludolf demonstrated that there was no actual native connection between Prester John and the Ethiopian monarchs,[56] and search for the fabled king gradually ceased.
But the legend had affected several hundred years of European and world history, directly and indirectly, by encouraging Europe's explorers, missionaries, scholars, and treasure hunters.
Charles Williams, a member of the 20th-century literary group the Inklings, made Prester John a messianic protector of the Holy Grail in his 1930 novel War in Heaven.
[64][65] In the 16th century, cartographer Abraham Ortelius produced a speculative map of John's empire in Africa, featuring A lion rampant facing to the sinister holding in its paws a quasi-Tau cross of full height.
