15th-century depiction of John Mandeville - Wikimedia
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Sources:
Prester John: The Legend and its Sources, compiled and translated by Keagan Brewer. Taylor & Francis, 2019.
Sir John Mandeville: The Book of Marvels and Travels, translated by Anthony Bale. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Aigle, Denise. The Mongol Empire Between Myth and Reality. Brill, 2014.
Jackson, Peter. The Mongols and the West:1221-1410. Routledge, 2018.
Rachewiltz, Igor de. Prester John and Europe's Discovery of East Asia. Australian National University Press, 1972.
Script:
Between 1232 and 1251, Alberic de Trois-Fontaines worked on his Chronica, an account of history all the way from the world’s creation up to his own time. I’m going to reference his writing here as a kind of “the story so far” for the Prester John series.
Of the year 1165, you read quote:
“And at this time, Prester John, King of the Indians, sent his letters full of astonishing things to diverse kings of Christendom, but especially to Manuel, the emperor of Constantinople, and to Frederick, the emperor of the Romans, out of which letters this was written: ‘Prester John, king of kings and lord of lords of the earth, by the power and virtue of God and our lord Jesus Christ, to Emanuel, governor of the Romans, health,’ and so on.”
Of 1170, you read:
“Certain letters of Pope Alexander were found, which he sent to Prester John mentioned above, who was also carefully instructed on the faith and customs of the Holy Roman Church by a certain Bishop Philip ordained by the same pope. This Philip had been sent across to the Roman Pope by the same Prester John.”
Of 1220, the story continued, picking up on matters which I talked about last episode but from a new perspective, one benefiting from hindsight that those crusaders did not have.
“After the capture of Damietta, a certain prophecy written in Chaldean letters was found in the temple of the Saracens, which Lord Pelagius, Cardinal-bishop of Albano, and legate to those parts, made to be translated into Latin, and sent to Rome to the lord pope, which a certain Master James, appointed legate to Ireland by the lord pope, carried from Rome to Clairvaux, continuing to Ireland. Many things were present in this astronomical prophecy about the things which came to pass in the promised land, … and that in the twenty-ninth year from the retaking of Acre, Damietta would be captured by the Christians, and many things are written there about cardinal Pelagius, which have turned out differently.
Indeed, a prophecy of this sort, although it speaks the truth in certain things, still deceives in many things. It was also written in that prophecy that a certain king would come from the eastern region, who will be called David by name, and that another king would come from the western region who will destroy the land of the Saracens up to Jerusalem, and that in the month of July a way should be made between the Saracens and the Christians near Cairo in Egypt…”
Of the following year, 1221, Alberic wrote:
“Then the highest pontiff Honorious wrote to all the archbishops of France that cardinal Pelagius had written from the overseas regions that King David, who is called Prester John, a God-fearing man, having passed Persia into his powerful hand and having subdued the Persian Sultan on the field of battle, invading and occupying his land for 24 days, possesses a great many fortified cities and castles. And he proceeded so far from that region that his army extended for ten days from Baghdad, that most great and famous city, which is said to be the special seat of the caliph, which the Saracens call their highest priest.”
The passage repeats many of King David’s deeds of conquest, but it ends on the following note, with a new dawning realization about the promised king:
“...this same King David was delayed around these parts for almost two years; and many other incredible things were said about them, but these few will suffice; indeed, some say that they are neither Christians nor Saracens.”
Some said it, that this king and his people were neither Christian nor Muslim, but it was uncertain. A 1234 entry, listing the nine orders of Christians who celebrated at the sepulchre in Jerusalem, included as the eight that, quote, “whole multitude of Christains which is subject to Prester John.” Then, in the year 1237, came a new twist, a new accommodation to the events of the day. Quote:
“Indeed, at that time arose the Tartars, a certain barbarian people under the power of Prester John. When Prester John was in battle against the Medes and Persians, he called them to his aid, and placed them in forts and fortifications; [the Tartars], seeing they were stronger, killed him and occupied his land for the most part, setting a king above them, as though he was Prester John; and from that time on they did many evils in the land, such that this year they killed 42 bishops in Greater Armenia.”
The increasing proximity of the Mongols had made their association with Prester John and King David awkward, but this was only one solution to that problem. There would be others.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that traverses medieval history through the stories of its travellers, or, as the case may be, its fictitious priest-kings. This is a podcast that’s supported by Patreon, so if you are enjoying the podcast, and you are in the position to do so, please do consider coming aboard on a pay-what-you-want basis. You can do that right now, at patreon.com/humancircus.
This episode, I want to thank the following new patrons for their support. Thank you Chris. Thank you Michelle. Thank you Christie. And thank you Janet. Thank you all very much.
And now, back to the story, back to the story of Prester John.
Last time, the last two times actually, we were covering the impact of Prester John on the Fifth Crusade, the impact of an idea really, the consequences of prophecy, rumour, and belief, the way things could go when a game of broken telephone led you to believe that a Christian emperor was coming to sweep you to victory, but you ended up with Genghis Khan. You’d been told of immense armies forming up beneath the cross, but you got Mongols.
As those Mongols grew ever closer, some would still hold out hope in the newcomers’ eschatological promise, with Frederick II apparently writing to the English king in 1241 that those Mongols had come to purify the Christians of their sins. However, the idea that they were coming to help would become increasingly untenable, and Matthew Paris would soon be describing them as a “detestable race of Satan.” Today’s episode is about how the Prester John narratives responded to all of this.
To a substantial degree, that response was going to involve characters who I’ve covered before on this podcast, back in its earlier days when I was talking about the friars who made trips east into Mongol territory. I won’t repeat their stories here, but I will go back to what they had to say about Prester John, as the question of the priest-king’s actual location became more concrete, as the vague idea of “somewhere out east” ran up against travel to real-world locations and into an increasing number of first-hand reports from very real “somewheres” in the east. With the map being coloured in, there was going to be less room left to place Prester John on his bejewelled throne and much more space for scepticism. Where was Prester John? What did those who travelled to his supposed home-lands see of him? How did they explain what they saw or more importantly didn’t see? When did the tide of the Prester John narrative take a turn?
One might mark that point as being some time before 1235, when Richard of San Germano wrote in his chronicle that King Andrew II of Hungary had sent a message to Pope Honorius III, telling Honorius of the approaching Mongol leader, referring to that leader as “King David, who is called Prester John in the common tongue.” David and his armies had “journeyed for seven years since they left India,” Honorius would have read, “carrying with them the body of blessed Thomas the Apostle, and in one day they killed 200,000 Russians and Cumans.” That association between the Mongol khans and Saint Thomas would not last. The one between them and Prester John would need to be revised.
In the mid-1240s, Friar Giovanni da Pian del Carpine made his long, long way east, starting from Lyon in April of 1245. Already in his 60s at the time of his departure, he would be more than 2 years on the road, making his way east through the lands of the Rus, going north of the Caspian Sea and to the camp of Batu Khan, then on even further east to witness the elevation of a new great khan, Guyuk, son of Ogedei, at a camp near Karakorum, and he would return alive from these travels, leaving a written report of what had happened and his observations on the Mongols and their history. For Carpine, Prester John was not someone to be looked to with hope, not someone expected to soon come riding over the crest of the hill with his unstoppable Christian army. For Carpine, he was not King David. He was a kind of side note to Mongol history, to the history of their invasion of India.
Genghis Khan, Carpine’s telling went, had been busy for some time with the conquest of the Qara Khitai, with sieges that had seen molten silver hurled upon them from the walls and then tunnelling under those walls, taking every part of their emperor’s lands save for one, which was located in the sea. After that, Genghis Khan had rested for a time, and he had sent one of his sons into India. The Mongol army captured “Lesser India,” populated by, quote, “black Saracens, who are called Ethiopians.” Then the Mongols had gone on into Greater India, where they had a much harder time.
The king of Greater India, none other than Prester John himself, had gathered up his Christian army and readied for battle. Ahead of his fighters, he had positioned copper figures on horseback, hollowed out and filled with Greek fire, with men at bellows placed behind each. When the Mongols attacked, they did so in the face of terrifying, all-consuming streams of this Greek fire, backed up by volley after volley of arrows. Prester John had “repelled [the Mongols] from [his] borders,” Carpine concluded, “nor have we ever heard that they returned to them again.”
I should note here that Greek fire appears to have been a later addition and perhaps not one made by Carpine himself. If it’s the case that it isn’t, then this later addition may actually obscure an original meaning, that the copper figures spewed a screen of dark smoke across the battlefield, not actually streams of fire. I should further note that the whole episode of bronze statues blasting forth smoke and/or flames may have been drawn from the Alexander romance, in which they were used to frighten opposing elephants.
This brief Carpine passage on Prester John is placed between one on the very real conquest of the Qara Khitai and an entirely fanciful one on a people the Mongols encountered on their way home. The women were human in form, but the men took that of dogs and, when the winter was at its coldest, rolled in the sand and freezing water to create an impenetrable coat of icy armour. This they wore to kill and maim many Mongols and drive them from their lands.
The bit about the ice-armoured dog men is reported to have been heard from some Russian clerics at the khan’s court, frequent sources of information for the friar. No mention as to where the Prester John information came from.
Wherever it was from, the Carpine account did the job of separating the priest-king from the Mongol khan—the belief that they were one and the same being no longer plausible—and sequestering him away from the khan’s conquests in a place of safety and power, a place from which his story could be recovered and given new life. Other tellings would be less open-ended.
Within a few years of Carpine’s departure, Simon of St Quentin was also headed east. As with the Franciscan Carpine, the Dominican St Quentin would also be looking to convert the Mongols, and like Carpine whose visit had been answered with a letter directing the pope to instead come and submit to the khan, he and his colleague Ascelin of Lombardy would be unsuccessful, really spectacularly so in their case. In a demonstration of startling diplomatic failure, their deaths would actually be ordered by their host on three separate occasions for disrespect before they’d be allowed to return home.
Simon would return safely home, and at least some of their account would survive in the writing of Vincent of Beauvais. That’s where we can find their version of the Prester John story, which I’ll read a passage from here. Quote:
“...from ancient times, Tartaria was subject to the King of India, and up till that time calmly and peacefully paid him the tribute that was due. When the aforesaid king asked for the customary tribute from them, he also ordered that some of them submit themselves to compulsory service, either in the armies or in work; they began complaining at this offence from the hand of their lord, and [took] counsel whether to simply obey him or to withstand him as much as possible.”
That was when Genghis Khan entered the story, and he, “who seemed [most] sagacious and venerable, gave counsel that they oppose their king’s order.” Then, quote:
“...they conspired against their lord King David, namely the son of once lord and emperor of India, Prester John, and, cunningly plot[ted against him]....”
“...roused by the possibility of shaking off their servitude and obtaining triumph, with a huge number of them departing their own land with bows and arrows and clubs or staffs, strengthened by their more powerful weapons, … they invaded the land of their lord simultaneously from two directions and completely saturated it with an effusion of blood. But King David, hearing of their unexpected coming, and being in no way strong enough to resist them, when he tried to flee from one section of the army, he was prevented and besieged by the other, and at length he was cut to pieces limb by limb, along with his whole family except for one daughter, namely the surviving daughter which Genghis Khan took to wife, and from whom, so it is said, he produced sons.”
So that was all quite specific, quite detailed, much more so than the accounts in Carpine or Alberic, and there’s more of it too, on the rise of Genghis Khan and the structure of the Mongol army, on a Nestorian monk who served first King David and then the khan, on the Mongol plan, “by the Devil’s instigation, … to subjugate the whole world,” and their success in “extending from Tartaria almost to the rising of the sun and from the rising of the sun to the Mediterranean Sea.” There was enough detail to the material on Genghis, David, and the daughter, that you might wonder if there wasn’t some truth to the whole story, as indeed there was.
There’ll be more on that later on, but first, a quick break.
…
Our next source on the Prester John question comes from the mid-1250s journey of yet another traveller from the early days of the podcast, from William of Rubruck, the Franciscan missionary much celebrated for his objective observations.
Regarding Prester John, William can best be described as unimpressed. He did not deny that there had been a King John, and he did not sequester that story safely away in unconquered parts of India, where the royal family could presumably trundle on at a safe distance from the Mongol threat.
There was a ruler named John, William said, and he was a Christian, a Nestorian. There was such a man, William said, and he’d died. He’d died without an heir and been replaced by his brother, someone who is described here as “having abandoned the worship of Christ, followed idols, keeping priests of idols with him, all of whom call upon demons and soothsayers.” That brother had moved in force against his neighbours, tired of the way they were always stealing his people’s animals, but a new leader had rallied those neighbours, uniting them, and taking them to victory over John’s brother and pretty much everyone else in the vicinity.
The story is basically similar to Simon’s, one which, as I said, had some truth to it. Both do, both being somewhat confused versions of events from Temujin’s rise to power, his path to becoming Genghis Khan. According to Simon and William, Prester John was not a near-omnipotent lord wielding armies and riches beyond measure, not anything close to that. He was just a sometime-ally and regional rival of the Mongol khans, long ago trampled beneath their advancing might.
“...the Nestorians called him King John,” William says, “and they used to say ten times more about him than was the truth. For in this way the Nestorians who come from those parts make great rumours from nothing.
…
And [when] I crossed through his fields, no one knew anything about him, except for a few Nestorians.”
Prester John had been there. He had been found, but he had already been crushed and no longer mattered. It’s an interesting story, and one wonders how William and Simon came by it.
The Mongols were no strangers to psychological warfare, were not by any means diplomatically naive, and they had these people showing up, these visitors from afar with questions about a certain priest-king. He was Christian, those visitors said, very powerful, and he was said to rule over lands out in this direction. Did their Mongol hosts know of such a man? Oh yes, those hosts may well have answered, winking to one another as they did so. We squished him years ago.
You could see how such a connection might be made, how such a connection could be made to stick.
Maybe instead, local Nestorians made the connection for the visitors—they may have had their own reasons. Maybe the Mongols did, perhaps out of an honest misunderstanding, perhaps less honest. There is a relevant example of their diplomatic use of the Prester John story. When they were lobbying Louis IX to attack Egypt simultaneously with their own assault on Baghdad, their Nestorian envoys informed the king that the great khan was a Christian and his mother was the daughter of Prester John. That Nestorian presence along with the Mongols’ religious tolerance made such stories easier to sell.
The narrative of a very real but quite unspectacular Prester John who’d fallen victim to the advancing Mongols would become the dominant one over the next century. You find some version of it repeated, or at least alluded to, in the mid-13th century work of Matthew Paris, and you could read it in Roger Bacon’s late-1260s Opus Majus, where Roger, known to have spoken with William after the friar’s return, wrote of a King John “about whom there was accustomed to be such a great rumour, and [about whom] many false things have been written and said.”
You read much of the same narrative in the late-13th century Syriac Chronicle by a bishop or catholicos of the Syriac Orthodox Church named Bar Hebraeus. There also, you hear of a Christian King John who had once held power over Genghis Khan but then was “completely destroyed, he himself was killed and his women, sons, and daughters were taken into captivity.” And it gets repeated in other sources too, well on into the 14th century.
Jean de Joinville, looking back on Louis IX’s involvement in the Seventh Crusade, would tell of the king’s representatives hearing a version the story from the Mongols, while the Franciscan Odoric of Pordenone would say little more of passing through Prester John’s lands than that “not one hundredth part is true of that which [was] said of him as though it were undeniable.”
This new framing of Prester John as someone much weaker and indeed deader than before, with all the confusion over different figures in Mongol history that went with it, was a compelling one, seeming to consign the priest-king to the disappointments section as far as Latin Christians were concerned. His intervention in the Holy Land had been promised and in the Fifth Crusade quite imminently expected, but he’d turned out to have been nothing more than a bit of an also-ran in the Mongols’ local sphere of power and not even always a particularly sympathetic one. In some of these tellings, it is the Mongols or their leader who are sometimes paired with positive biblical references, are, in a sense, Christianized, while Prester John is abandoned by God for some failure of faith or arrogance.
However, we haven’t quite gotten to perhaps the most influential Prester John texts of the era.
One of them was, one would now say, ghost-written, and many have since doubted its protagonist did much of what he’d said. The other, actually the more suspect of the two, was the work of an at least in part armchair traveller who cobbled it together from the reports of others. Both would be still more impactful than any of these other sources I’ve mentioned here, more than any travelling friar. Each would take quite a different approach to the Prester John issue.
In the closing years of the 13th century, one Marco Polo, recently returned from his many years abroad, dictated what he’d seen to fellow prisoner Rusticello of Pisa, and of course it wasn’t all about Prester John. That was actually only a very small part of what he had to say, but then again he did have quite a lot to say in general.
Marco Polo’s Prester John content added detail to the by-now familiar story of a subordinate, not-yet Genghis Khan successfully rising up against the priest-king. It’s a much more developed narrative, in which Ong Khan, who Marco assures us is “the Prester John of whose kingdom everyone speaks,” senses the imminent power of his subjects and tries to disperse them, only to see them fade safely away into the desert. Genghis Khan unites those subjects, making them into the kind of force that Prester John had feared. He demands John’s daughter in marriage, a demand to which John does not react diplomatically. Marco Polo tells of Genghis’s astronomers predicting their lord's victory, and then he tells of that victory, Prester John’s death, and Genghis’s conquests that followed. But that’s not the end of the story.
Unlike some of those other versions, Marco Polo’s Prester John isn’t entirely a creature of the past, for Prester John’s story was not finished with his death. His descendants ruled as provincial kings under the power of the great khan. Each king became Prester John, the name, as it sometimes did, becoming a title that could be passed down, arriving, in Marco’s time, with a man named George, likely an attempt at Korgiz.
As with many Prester John reports of the time, Marco’s splices the priest-king onto Mongol history, but he then extends the story, bringing it up to date with news of “Prester John’s” descendants, something which Giovanni da Montecorvino, a missionary in Yuan China, would soon also attest to. As for that other highly influential source of this era which I mentioned, one to rival Marco Polo in immediate and lasting impact, that would take a different direction. For that, we turn to the pseudonymous 14th-century travel writer John Mandeville.
For the Mandeville author, one of, or arguably the great medieval syncretist, you find everything all at once. There are Great Khans, and there is Prester John, but the one has not defeated the other. The great khan always marries his daughter, but then he always marries the khan’s. The two great lords are set safely apart from one another, the khan in Cathay and the priest-king in an India separated into many islands by the rivers that flow forth from Paradise, reachable by travellers departing from Hormuz though they had to be wary massive magnetic rocks that prevented anyone from using iron nails in their ships.
To the Prester John of the Mongol world, and of early-13th-century history, the Mandeville author adds back in all the wonders of the 12th-century priest-king. The one with the 72 provinces whose kings all submitted to him and served at his command. The one with the palaces full of emerald, gold, amethyst, and sapphire. The one whose lands included geographical oddities such as a river of rocks and were walked upon by horned men.
The Mandeville author doesn’t just put a lot of the Prester John letter material back into the mix. They also add this or that detail from other sources, colouring in the priest-king’s realm with such features as the Valley of Devils, previously reported by Franciscan travellers to the east, and with the Old Man of the Mountain, that wealthy lord whose mountain-fortress featuring wine fountains, beautiful people, and clockwork birds was used, along with strong drugs, to promise paradise and to bend visitors to his bidding and forge them into his assassins. He is not, here in this version of the story, associated in any way with Islam.
Away from the restrictions of Mongol dominance and Franciscan observations, Prester John’s islands could include flesh-eating giants who raised sheep, “malevolent women, who [had] precious gems in their eyes” and could kill a man with their sight, and women who, quote, “had serpents in their bodies that stung their husbands on the penis.”
With all those islands set among the rivers of paradise, a writer could really allow themselves to wander among feathered people who walked on water as easily as land, to include the incursions of King Alexander and somewhere the author was decent enough to admit he hadn’t personally visited, a place of dragons, unicorns, and “innumerable blue-and-white elephants.”
The Mandeville author really reestablished a sense of wonder in the Prester John story, wrenching it back from the troubling realities that had overtaken it, and in Mandeville, Prester John had a powerful champion, much more so than all those other accounts of the Mongols having killed and conquered the priest-king. For all that those Franciscans and Dominicans had been skeptical as to the actual power of Prester John after their travels in Asia, it was the Mandeville text that would be shared most widely, to the point that one of Mandeville’s sources, Odoric of Pordenone who I mentioned earlier, would sometimes be introduced in copies of his writing as a “companion of the knight Mandeville in India,” to the point that Christopher Columbus would have an annotated copy of it. Reports were filtering back into the Latin Christian world that Prester John was not and had never been someone to invest your hopes in, but then there was this widely copied work running counter to that whole narrative.
Although the bulk of the sources I’ve referenced here in this episode would have you believe it, Prester John was not dead and buried. Although reports were arriving of the awe-inspiring power of the Mongols and the stark invisibility of Prester John, the story of the priest-king was not to be discarded, not for quite some time yet. But there would be changes.
By the time that John Mandeville returned from his quote-unquote “journey,” or, if you prefer, by the time its author completed their text, those changes had already begun to appear. They’d been popping up for a while, the first traces more than a century earlier, but starting to gain steam earlier in that 14th century. On a 1310 map, since destroyed during World War II. On another from the 1330s. In texts from around that same time by Jordanus de Severac and Jacob of Verona, and before then by John of Carignano. In the next century, that change would really take hold.
It wouldn’t be entirely constant. Prester John’s location never would be, and there’d still be texts which placed him in India, in Asia, but a new wave of writings was coming and Prester John was moving to Ethiopia. Next episode, that’s where we’ll be going too.
If you are listening to the Patreon, expect me back shortly with a little something extra. If not, expect me back with the next Prester John episode, or maybe something special for Halloween. Either way, I’ll talk to you then.