Prester John Tutorial

 the tutorial examines the legend of Prester John, the Christian priest-king who ruled a fabulous
kingdom located somewhere beyond the frontiers of Christendom.
 Our source for discussion is the so-called 'Letter of Prester John': a text which was supposedly a
letter written by Prester John himself, describing the fabulous wealth and strange wonders of his
realm.

 The letter
◦ “I, Prester John, am lord of lords and exceed all kings of the entire earth in virtue, in power,
and in all the riches which are under heaven. (…) I am a devoted Christian, and everywhere
we protect the Christians that our clemency’s authority rules over, and we sustain them with
our alms.”
◦ “Our magnificence holds power over the three Indias ((2 are in India, 1 is in the Horn of
Africa, across the sea from it)), and our land crosses from Farther India (in which rests the
body of St Thomas the apostle), through the desert, and proceeds towards the sunrise, and
returns down into the Babylonian desert”
◦ “In our land are born and raised elephants, dromedaries, camels, hippopotami, crocodiles,
methagallinarii, cametheternis, thinsiretae (made up animals), cicadas, griffins, tigers,
jackals, hyenas, savage cows, centaurs, savage men, horned men, fauns, satyrs both male
and female, pygmies, dog-headed men, giants whose height is 40 cubits tall, one-eyed men,
cyclopses, the bird which is called ‘phoenix’, and almost every kind of animal which is
under heaven.”
◦ Rich in milk and honey + precious stones
◦ ppl carry a herb called wormwood that fends off evil spirits, and no one is ever attacked bc
of this
◦ “clear spring (…) which preserves all sorts of flavours within it. The flavour changes every
hour of the day and night. (…) If any thirsty person drinks from this fountain three times, he
will suffer no illness from that day forth; and no matter how long he lives, he will always be
as though he is 32 years old.”
◦ a sea of sand and a river of stones
◦ there is a river where one can find precious gems on the river bed, so boys are raised in
water in order to be able to live underwater for three months to fish out gems
◦ “Although [the ten tribes of Jews] contrive kings for themselves, they are in fact our
servants and are tributaries to our excellency.”
◦ “There is no poor man among us. Neither can any thief or robber be found among us, nor
does any sycophant have a place there, and nor is there greed. No division exists among us.”
◦ the palace is decorated with onyx + precious stones + gold; its furniture is made of ivory,
onyx, gold, amethyst, sapphire...
 In what ways might the search for Prester John have shaped the expectations of medieval
travellers to the Orient?
◦
 What does the 'Letter of Prester John' tell us about medieval attitudes towards lands and peoples
beyond the frontiers of Christendom?
◦ “The story that there was a Christian king in Asia would not in principle have surprised
people living in the twelfth century West. The Franks of Jerusalem, and through them the
people of Western Europe, knew that there were still Christians living in Asia, since some of
them came on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and had churches and hostels there. They also knew
that those from the more distant parts of Asia were for the most part members of the
Nestorian, or Chaldean, Church ((the church to which Prestor John is said to belong to)).”
◦ “They also knew that there were some independent Christian kingdoms in the east whose
rulers had considerable military capacity. King David III of Georgia (1089-1125), for
example, had gained many victories over the Muslims in what would now be eastern
Turkey.”

◦ “Many were skeptical about the fantasies told about him, but there exists no piece of
evidence prior to the eighteenth century that argued that Prester John never existed in some
form or another either in the past or in a distant yet-to-be-discovered land.”
◦ “By the thirteenth century, believing in the legend was made easier by the important shift in
the meaning of the term ‘Prester John’ from the name of a single man to the title for a line of
kings, a vague description for any great Christian ruler who was uncovered as a result of
European exploration. (…) Prester John became the means through which Europeans came
to understand that there were Christians beyond the European purview, in the steppes of
Central Asia, in Ethiopia, India, China, Persia, Syria, or elsewhere. One could very well
doubt the tall tales told of Prester John in documents like the Letter but still believe in
Prester John as an embodiment of these very real communities of foreign Christians.”
◦ “The Letter ’s fantastic representation of Prester John’s kingdom was the continuation of a
vast tradition of scholarly representations of the Orient”
◦ “It was a widely documented truth that the Orient was a land of marvels and this remained
the belief for the most part until the exploration of Asia gradually made it untenable. In
depicting Prester John’s eastern kingdom as a land of marvels, the Prester John Letter was
therefore not a controversial departure from received ideas about the East, but a
confirmation of them”
◦ “medieval people based their knowledge of the Orient on travellers’ tales and on the written
authority of works such as the mythological compendium of Solinus and the fictional
descriptions of Alexander the Great’s journeys to the East. The fanciful stories told by such
texts were unverifiable to the medieval European, so they were often repeated and came to
be perceived as fact, although there were of course many who wondered about the East’s
marvellous reputation, or were openly dissatisfied with the authority of such texts. (…) At a
time when proper exploration of Asia was impossible, such texts filled in the gap in
medieval knowledge of the Far East.”
◦ “Prester John was a convenient way for medieval Europeans to interpret a world they could
 not understand, and the popularity of the legend suggests it had a wide appeal and a
powerful influence on medieval perceptions of the great oriental Unknown.”
◦ “Reactions to the Prester John Letter were polarised. While some accepted it as a factual
document written by Prester John, others were hesitant and felt that the marvels it described
were too fantastic to be believed. The decision to believe or disbelieve the Letter was
ultimately a personal one. This can be demonstrated by the polarity of reactions that is
reflected in textual sources that discuss it”

 What were the origins of the myth of Prester John?

◦ “the historian Otto of Freising met Hugh, the Catholic bishop of Jabala in the principality of
Antioch, who related how ‘not many years ago a certain John, king and priest, living in the
furthest lands of the east beyond Persia and Armenia’, who was a Nestorian Christian, as
were his subjects, had made war on the kings of the Persians and Medes, and severely
defeated them. He had wanted to help the Church of Jerusalem, but had not been able to
find a means of transporting his army across the river Tigris.”
◦ “Bishop Hugh added that the priest-king was said to be descended from the Three Wise Men
who had come to worship the infant Christ.”
◦ “Seljuk Sultan and ruler of eastern Persia had been defeated by the Kara-Khitai, or Black
Cathayans, whose ruler was a pagan, but some of whose people were Nestorian (or more
properly Chaldean) Christians. This event had been transmuted into a story which boosted
Christian morale by claiming that beyond the lands of Islam there were powerful Christian
rulers who were potential allies of the Franks in the Crusader States.”
◦ “Honorius ((a historian)) reported that India was the source of pepper, but also a land of
marvels. Its peoples included various monstrous races. India was home to many strange
forms of wildlife such as the man-eating manticore. In the Red Sea were to be found the
fertile island of Taprobane (now known as Sri Lanka) and the fabled isles of Gold and
Silver, whose wealth was guarded by dragons and gryphons. (…) The river Phison,
((represented by the Ganges on earth)), is associated in Genesis with gold and gems and
consequently India was believed to be a land of great natural riches.”
◦ “Continued Western interest in Prester John, and therefore in India, was at least partly due to
the failure of the Second Crusade in 1148 to recover Edessa and to the continuing growth of
Islamic power in the Near East. In those circumstances news of a strong, potential Christian
ally in the Far East was welcome.”
◦ “In c. 1165 a letter purporting to be written by Prester John began to circulate in Western
Europe.”
◦ “Prester John’s claim to rule the Third India, therefore, could not be challenged by people in
the West, because they did not know what was happening there.”

◦ “A man by the name of Patriarch John had journeyed from India to Rome in 1122.
According to the story, John had left his Indian homeland because of the death of his
predecessor. He journeyed to Byzantium to attend a ceremony recognising his appointment
as Patriarch of the Indies, and met some papal legates that told him about the magnificence
of Rome, and convinced him to continue his journey there. When he finally arrived in
 Rome, John described India as a land of marvels and miracles. (…) No one lived there but
the most faithful Christians; all non-Christian men who entered were either converted or
died instantly. One of the rivers of paradise flowed through the city’s centre, depositing gold
and gemstones by which the people were made extremely rich. A church outside the city
housed the body of St Thomas, the apostle who evangelised India according to Christian
tradition. (…) This is the story as told in an anonymous text known as the De Adventu
Patriarchae Indorum (‘On the Arrival of the Patriarch of the Indians’)”
◦ “Most people would disregard the story told in the De Adventu as legendary nonsense were
it not for the existence of another completely independent text that corroborates the visit of
this John to Rome. This second text is a letter written by Odo of Rheims, a man who was
apparently present in Rome when the mysterious John made his visit (…) The accounts of
the De Adventu and the letter of Odo are similar in essence but differ in many specifics. In
Odo’s letter, for example, John is not called a patriarch but an archbishop. Odo also gave a
completely different catalyst for John’s journey. John did not begin his journey because his
predecessor had died, as the De Adventu put it, but because the leader of India had recently
died without an heir, and the Indians sought a Byzantine prince to fill the vacancy. After
several princes died returning to India, the Byzantine emperor refused to send another, and
so John continued his journey to Rome to try to find one there. In Rome, John proceeded
with the fabulous speech about his Indian homeland and the miracles of St Thomas.”
◦ “Because the two texts differ in many details, and because they use very different
vocabulary to discuss the same ‘events’, it is clear that they are not textually related. The
simplest explanation is that there is a kernel of historical fact underneath the legendary
veneer. It seems likely that someone did travel to Rome, but probably not from what we
today would call ‘India’. This impostor was certainly a Christian, since he was well-versed
in the standard St Thomas legends.”
◦ “Two decades later, when Europeans heard rumours of a great battle between a powerful
Islamic leader and his unknown foe in the Far East, they would cast their minds back to
John and his marvellous Indian homeland. Although in reality the Islamic leader’s enemy
was a Buddhist Khitan warrior from the Central Asian steppe, the residents of the Crusader
States who first heard tell of the battle assumed that he was a Christian who possessed the
same pious desire to expunge the Muslim infidel that they did. The spread of this rumour
provided the occasion for the first written record of John, no longer as a patriarch or
archbishop, but a priest-king in his own right, and under the name by which he was to be
remembered for centuries to come: Presbiter Johannes, Prester John.”