16th-century map of Prester John’s Empire
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In the closing years of the 15th century, the Augustinian monk and chronicler Giacomo Filippo Foresti recorded his Supplementum chronicarum at Bergamo. In it, he wrote of much that does not directly concern this story, of the heroes of ancient mythology or the figures of the Old Testament, all the way up to the doings of more recent kings and emperors. But he wrote of one thing that very much does. He wrote of Ethiopia and its ruler.
“Indeed, it is known that this emperor in the time of Clement V in the year of our Lord 1306 sent 30 legates to the king of the Spains; and let it be known that he was offering him aid against the infidels. They came also to Avignon to present themselves reverently to Clement V, the Pontifex Maximus, and instructed by many apostolic letters, they went to the well worth seeing places of the relics of the Apostles Peter and Paul in Rome. Having seen these, they returned with joy to their own home. But in Genoa they had to wait many days for the time to sail back, and while they waited, they had sat down [as] it happens and were asked much about their rites, customs and regions before they left, on which [this] same author has written.”
“This emperor” at the beginning of the passage was none other than our main character, Prester John, now of Ethiopia. That “same author” at the end has been identified as cartographer and priest Giovanni da Carignano, a man who made profitable use of the many well-travelled visitors passing through his Genoa. He was the one said to have interviewed the members of that early-14th-century Ethiopian embassy and to have recorded what they told him, allowing us to now read of it as it was transmitted in Foresti’s chronicle, or at least, that’s the story. It’s been suggested that maybe the Ethiopian emperor, Wedem Arad, had sought willing allies against his Muslim neighbours to the north. It’s been argued that an Ethiopian embassy of the time was the spark for the whole Ethiopian Prester John association that followed. But some have challenged this aspect of the Foresti text and the story I just told.
Foresti’s primary source for the Ethiopia material that his chronicle contained seems not have been Carignano’s encounter but instead a then very popular collection of the lives of saints, including the apostle Matthew’s Ethiopian story, complete with a sorcerer, a dragon, and a fairly indiscriminate use of the designation “aethiops.” There was a later, 1370ish document, once seen as a supporting one, ostensibly a letter to the Holy Roman Emperor that references an earlier mission from an Ethiopian King named Voddomaradeg, but that’s widely thought to be a forgery.
So was there then really an Ethiopian embassy in those very early years of the 1300s? Did it travel to Italy, Spain, France, and Portugal? Is Foresti’s account of Ethiopia and its embassy to be trusted? Was there perhaps indeed an embassy, but it’s origins were incorrectly identified or became corrupted over time and transmission? Might such an embassy have been instead from some other poorly understood location, taken to be that of Prester John? Or were there really Ethiopians, just not actually ambassadors? Might they instead have been pilgrims who either deliberately took on the guise of envoys to ease their way or else were misunderstood? Might they have come from Jerusalem, as members of the Ethiopian clerical community there?
There are a lot of questions, a lot of possibilities.
But while that particular embassy—the first of its kind, if it did indeed occur—is hard to pin down and may not have actually happened, there would most definitely be others. Other arrivals from Ethiopia, other travellers going the other way. A heightened exchange, the existence of which, by the next century, would become entirely uncontroversial, and part of that story would be Prester John.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast covering medieval history, most often through the stories of its travellers but sometimes instead through its fictitious rulers. And it is a podcast that is supported by a Patreon, something that you, if you’re enjoying listening, can also do at patreon.com/humancircus, where you can enjoy early, extra, and ad-free listening on a pay-what-you-can basis. There’s no obligation for you to sign your future children and/or business ventures over to me, or commit on a lifetime basis. You can dip in, drop out, come back in, or edit the amount you’d like to contribute at any time. This time, I would like to especially thank Laura Ann and Ryne for coming aboard. Thank you very much, both of you!
And now, back to the story. Last time, or the time before last I mean, the episode before that Halloween one, we were looking at what Keagan Brewer has termed a story of skeptics and extenders, of those who had come to doubt the priest-king narrative and those who had stretched it to take in the new circumstances. We were looking at the story of the Mongol Prester John, that peculiar character whose existence blended the existing Prester John tropes with figures from the rise of Genghis Khan. This time, and also with the next episode, we’re moving the story all the way from a vaguely understood India and the Central Asian steppe, not the same place I realize, to Ethiopia, and that may not be quite as dramatic a move as you might think, not so great a leap as it might seem geographically and indeed nautically.
I say this because there was already some connection between Ethiopia and India, and I don’t just mean the history of maritime trade that had linked the locations. There was a connection in the geographical imaginary, in the way that the idea of “India” or “the Three Indias,” Prester’s previous location, was a very malleable destination, sometimes, as Brewer writes, “called a by-word for the unknown world beyond the Islamic territories of the Near East.” There was a connection in the ancient Greek division of Asia from Africa being just the Nile itself, an idea that echoed forward even as European travel in the region began to become more common. The migration of Prester John was facilitated by this state of ambiguity and also by the reality that there were indeed Christian rulers in the new location, by our period well into those of the long-running Solomonic dynasty.
So the jump wasn’t as huge as it at first might seem, and by the period we’re focusing on today, the 15th century, it wasn’t entirely new either. There was that one embassy, maybe, in the first years of the 1300s, and as I mentioned there at the end last time, there were other traces of Prester John in his east African location. There were mentions on maps or in texts, for example on a 1310 map, the work of the aforementioned Giovanni da Carignano since lost to the destruction of World War II, or in the text of roughly that same time by Jordanus de Severac, a missionary to India who, among others, would point in the direction of east Africa as the place to find the priest-king. Jacob of Verona would refer upon returning from Jerusalem to, quote, “Black Ethiopians from among the people of Prester John, who is one of the greatest princes in the world.” He would go on to say that those Ethiopians enjoyed unusual privileges because their lord held the power to divert the Nile river, a significant advantage to hold over the sultan in Egypt.
All of that said, though the 15th-century leap to Ethiopia may not have been so dramatic as it initially appears, though the move was not entirely unprecedented and there had been those earlier mentions of an Ethiopian Prester John, it was still a significant move in the story. It was another very recognizable shift in the narrative, another Prester John chapter that we can circle as something distinct. There would be new elements, but some of the same familiar themes were still going to drive European interest in the priest king, including, as ever, the promise of an ally against the Islamic powers, now against the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and the Levant.
That appears to have been what drove Henry IV of England in the year 1400 to address himself to the “king of Abyssinia, Prester John,” and why Konrad, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, did the same, though it doesn’t seem that either message reached their goal. Around the same time, Charles VI of France is also thought to have addressed a letter to the Ethiopian Prester John. He sought clarification, complaining as to the general confusion over who and where Prester John was, a very fair position one has to say.
All through the 15th century, the Prester John signs overwhelmingly point to the region of Ethiopia. You have letters sent that way from popes Eugenius IV, Calixtus III, and Sixtus IV. You have a note that the region was a good place to learn about Prester John, a note to be found, somewhat oddly, in a record otherwise describing the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands. You have the Grand Master of the Hospitallers telling Charles VII that he had met Indian monks on Rhodes who had told him that Prester John, the ruler of Ethiopia, had won great victories against the Muslims and might well continue on into Egypt and beyond. Though there were exceptions, there was a clear identification emerging with Prester John and the rulers of Ethiopia. But I should say something here about who those rulers were. Aside from seeing a little of them through the Prester John lens, who were they actually?
As I mentioned earlier, “they” were in this case the Solomonic dynasty, the name reflecting Solomon as the figure from whom they claimed descent, and lines of that dynasty would be around for quite some while yet, from the mid-to-late-13th century victory of Yekuno Amlak over the last of the Zagwe dynasty, all the way up to Haile Selassie—and yes, it is that Haile Selassie—in the 1970s. So yes, the dynasty ran for quite some time.
What we’ll be looking at during this episode will largely involve the first half of the 15th century, and my focus here won’t generally be on these rulers, their achievements or personalities, nor will it be on their European counterparts, the various kings, princes, and popes who made up the other side of this exchange. But I should note here that this is the period which opened with the rule of Dawit I, or the 2nd, if you’re counting the biblical King David as 1, and then, after the very brief reign of his son, Tewodros I, the 15-years of his second son Yeshaq, followed, in rapid succession, by Andreyas, Takla Maryam, Sarwe Iyasus, and Amda Iyasus, with only the second of those managing much more than a year, before the 32 years of Zara Yaqob that would bring the story up to the summer of ‘68.
The rulers, the emperors or nägäśt of that dynasty had, over the last century and more, expanded at the expense of the surrounding non-Christian kingdoms and sultanates. Christian realms had long, long existed in and around Ethiopia, but Latin Europe had, by and large, known fairly little of them, and this may come as some surprise. It was not so very far away, not so very far removed from the world of the Mediterranean and with links to Egypt, but apparently it seems those weren’t quite the right links for a strong flow of communication on to Europe, or really it was the other way around. According to Emeri van Donzel, Latin Christian communications with Christians in Egypt, not always strong to begin with, were very much centred around the Orthodox patriarchs of Alexandria when it was the Coptic church that had connections further south, connections to African Christian kingdoms that were still little known to Latin Europe.
Meanwhile, as Matteo Salvadore notes, much of the 14th century had seen something of a quote/unquote iron curtain set between Ethiopia and the relatively proximate Mediterranean world. With Dawit and his successors, relations with the Mamluks improved, and the way north was, the occasional conflict, confiscation, or arrest aside, open.
Canonically Christian, at times associated with great wealth, occasionally at odds with their Muslim neighbours, the origin in apocalyptic texts of those who were going to destroy Mecca, and mysterious enough to Latin Christians to offer something of a blank slate to be projected upon, there was emerging a significant interest in Ethiopia and in an Ethiopian Prester John. And that interest would be returned, but the two sides of this developing relationship did not always want the same thing.
Latin Europe, courts in Portugal, Spain, and Italy, would, in the 15th century, look to Ethiopia with growing enthusiasm for a willing ally in war—the dream of Prester John as the conquering Christian hero somewhere out beyond the Muslims had not died with the Mongol arrivals—but the Ethiopian ambassadors, when they came—and they would come, however contentious that initial 1306 contact I spoke of may be—they had something else in mind. It was true that there had been conflicts with the Mamluks, that there would be more of such conflicts, and that people like the Muslim chronicler al-Maqrizi wrote with concern of the possibility of such an alliance, for why else would the Ethiopian emperors trouble themselves so to send envoys? But the embassies from Ethiopia did not come looking for war.
After this quick break, we’ll get into what those embassies did come looking for.
...
When those Ethiopian embassies came, they came for craftspeople and artisans—masters of working in stone, wood, metal, and paint, who would return with them to work their trade—and this was not necessarily due to any lack of the sort on their part. They were not necessarily motivated by a local lack of that technical ability, though obviously that is one possible reason. But Verena Krebs has argued that the Solomonic rulers seem instead to have been animated by a desire to emulate the biblical Solomon himself, for he was ever said to have been sending envoys abroad for this or that material or craftsman in connection to the first temple. As Krebs puts it, for the rulers involved, “Late medieval Solomonic outreach towards Europe was largely the result of aesthetic and dynastic, not territorial or militaristic, acquisitiveness,” not, I should add, that those rulers seem to have been particularly against military-won acquisitions. It’s just that that’s not why they sent expeditions to Europe.
For many of those actually making the journey, the reasons do seem, at least in part, to have been religious.
There were pilgrims recorded in Bologna in 1402, and in 1407 celebrating mass in one of the city’s squares. The court of Valencia would play host to Ethiopian monks, as would Venice around the year 1440, as well as Barcelona. The period that Matteo Salvadore would term an “Ethiopian Age of Exploration” was underway.
It was during this century, though some traditions have it occurring earlier, that the Santo Stefano degli Abissini in Rome was given over to Ethiopian monks in the city as a place to stay, study, and pursue pilgrimage. And I’m not sure exactly how many numbers that translated to, but the Roman curia did with some regularity issue letters of indulgence for Ethiopian pilgrims to ease their passage, letters which extended spiritual incentives to those who might help the letter-carriers out as they toured, for example, the tombs of the apostles. It was also during this period that Ethiopians took part in the councils of Constance and Florence.
At the Council of Constance in southern Germany, the 1414-18 council better known for the treacherous killing of Jan Hus and the ending of the Western Schism, the Ethiopian involvement appears to have been minimal and unofficial. Not so, however, with that at Florence which they joined, in progress, in 1441, joined after it had been moved to that location in order to avoid the plague.
There, they were invited. In fact, Prester John was invited by Pope Eugene IV, “Prester John Emperor of Ethiopia,” as part of a broader range of invitations sent out to various nations and “eastern churches.” I should note here that the Ethiopian attendees would protest that “Prester John” was not in fact an appropriate title or name for their emperor, but that does not seem to have bothered anyone overmuch in continuing to use it.
The invitation, the letter, was carried to Ethiopia by a friar named Alberto de Sarteano, or at least he was charged with its delivery. What he actually did manage to do was to put it in the hands of a man named Nicodemus, abbot of the Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem. It was actually the abbot’s representatives, numbering about 40, that would arrive in Florence, not those of Emperor Zara Yaqob, something which is clear in the attendees’ stance that they were there to listen and to report back, not to make any binding agreements without first speaking to their ruler. Still, they caught the attention of the other attendees. One of Eugene’s secretaries recorded the words of the head of their legation, to the effect that they may seem strange to their hosts, that their Christianity may have diverged from the small-o orthodox beliefs, but that was only because of their great distance from the Christian centre, because, he implied, of their hosts’ neglect. “We think,” he is to have said, presumably through a translator, “it is for more than 800 years that the Popes have not dispatched somebody to tell us ‘may God bless you.’”
Unlike the Egyptian church, the Ethiopians did not leave with a letter of unity, due in part no doubt to their lack of decision-making authority, but there would be other consequences of their attendance. Their discussions were not limited to the realm of the theological. One person who spoke to them there in Florence was the influential cosmographer Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli. He would later write to the pope in support of the Ethiopians, but he would also write to an advisor of the Portuguese king, and in that letter, in which he mentioned his geographical discussion with the representatives of Prester John, he outlined his suggestion that they ought to try to reach India by sailing west. It is apparently the subject of some controversy as to exactly how impactful this suggestion was, but it is worth noting that Christopher Columbus was going to copy that letter out in his diary, so I would say that the potential ceiling of that impact was quite high.
Though those Ethiopian representatives did not seem to care much for their ruler to be designated as Prester John, though the ambitions of these two sides would not always exactly align, they would not always want the same things, that did not fully dampen the European enthusiasm. When, quote, “two ambassadors of … Prester John, one Christian and the other infidel, came to Alfonso king of Aragon, in the year of our Lord 1427,” Alfonso moved to arrange a dual-marriage alliance with his Ethiopian counterpart Yeshaq I and sent along 13 of the requested artisans. Nothing came of the marriage proposal though, and following an unsettled period of 4 emperors in 15 years, when Zara Yacob came to power and made contact with Alfonso again, it was clear that the artisans and their party had not made it back. This time, Alfonoso again sent artisans, but he wanted guarantees of their safety, and he had his own requests too, that the Ethiopian ruler join in an assault on Egypt, and that he divert the course of the Nile, something that was understood to be in his power. The idea of a natural ally, and a powerful one, against the Mamluks would not dissipate, no matter how little an appetite the Ethiopian embassies of this period displayed for such an idea.
In an interesting anecdote from that latter embassy, one of our sources there is a Dominican friar named Ranzano. He’d heard of the Ethiopian envoys’ visit and made preparations to meet with them— he’d even arranged for an interpreter, an Ethiopian raised in Italy since adolescence. However, when they met the envoy, who Ranzano thought looked more Egyptian than Ethiopian, and he told his interpreter to pass along the proper greetings, the envoy waved him aside and spoke to Ranzano directly. His name was Rombulo, and he was originally from Messina. He’d lived in Ethiopia for 37 years, and he had married and had 8 children there.
Rombulo’s presence at this meeting, though interesting, is not all that unusual. These embassies, these artistic and architectural recruitment missions, might be represented by someone like an al-Tabrizi, a Persian merchant who’d long done business in Cairo and accompanied a 1427 visit to Valencia only to come to an unhappy ending just 2 years later, arrested and put to death in Mamluk Egypt for bringing arms to an enemy. He’d been in previous trouble of the sort and already cautioned, but the letter he was found with apparently spoke more to a desire for goldwork, crosses, and relics than weapons, and outweighing the weapons he was found with was the large quantity of rich garments, embroidered with golden Christian symbols. Perhaps this was what had also happened with Alfonso’s original 13 artisans.
Often, those embassies seem to have been represented by Italians, people such as the Florentine Antonio Bartoli back in 1402.
In that year, Bartoli had brought visitors to Venice from Dawit I, or, in the sources, from quote, “His Excellency Lord Prestozane,” the “Eminent lord Prester John, lord of the regions of India.” There was still some confusion over that last part, but the gifts those visitors brought, live leopards and what seems to have been the hides of apes and zebras, surely excited attention. The Ethiopian envoys looked to bring back artisans—they’d leave with a Florentine painter named Pietro, an armourer from Napoli who’d been living in Padua, and three Antonios: one from Treviso and two, a mason and a carpenter, from Florence—and they had other interests too, which reach us rather indirectly through a Dominican archbishop in Persia. He’d heard of the embassy and recorded its aims as “priestly vestments, …, chalices, crosses, [and] saintly relics,” but we actually have a more immediate record of those aims in an Ethiopian source.
The Homily on the Wood of the Holy Cross, as the document is known, describes the gifts in great detail. It comes to us in the form of a late-19th or early 20th-century handwritten parchment copy of a medieval manuscript—something which is apparently not an uncommon find in Ethiopian medieval studies—and it takes us back to an original impetus for the entire Venetian expedition. According to the text, there had been strangers who had come to Emperor Dawit’s realm, travellers, perhaps merchants or pilgrims, depending on how you take the wording, and representatives of the, quote, “king of the Franks,” Franks not necessarily in the specific sense.
The text has it that in the process of testing whether these intruders were indeed Christians, Dawit had asked them if they then knew what had become of the True Cross. To this, the strangers from afar had answered that the cross was fragmented, divided up among various Christian rulers who each wished to gain its strength for their realm. Naturally, Dawit was intrigued, for why should he not also have such a thing? One of the strangers was dispatched to fetch him one, with the prize of 1,000 gold pieces to be paid when he returned. Which he did.
The Homily, supported by a contemporaneous Egyptian Coptic source, has the stranger returning with, among other things, relics, mirrors, vestments, rugs, fabrics, a silver chalice, and of course, that piece of the True Cross. That particular relic, apparently the reason for the whole venture, was not mentioned on the Venetian end, or maybe it was and that source just hasn’t reached us. Maybe the item was instead acquired on the homeward journey from Venice. There was certainly a great deal of motivation for the traveller not to return without such an object.
The 1402 visit is a little unusual, just in the relative wealth of information available on it, the number of sources or traces it left for us to follow. A 1404 journey would leave hardly any trace at all, save for in the correspondence of a man in the Friuli region of northeastern Italy. “There are three Black Ethiopians from India,” he wrote, displaying a bit of that blurring of the two places which I talked about. “Good Christians, who brought along a young interpreter, they want to visit holy churches and always ask about sacred relics.” Again, war with the Mamluks seems to have not been much on the mind or the agenda.
Underlining the uncertainties of travel at the time, the stated reason for that 1404 expedition into Europe was actually to learn the fate of an earlier one to Rome, one which had apparently not arrived by the time of this second group’s departure. That earlier group is sometimes identified with the 1402 trip to Venice, but then we know of its return. Maybe it had just been a little later than expected getting back. Maybe there had been a third venture, between the two, that had not made it.
Our Friuli correspondent, named Candido, doesn’t have a great deal to say of what he witnessed in 1404, but he does write of one particularly striking scene, of the Ethiopian travellers gathering at the court of the Cardinal of Aquileia, where they were questioned by a local professor of law as to lives, land, and religion, and where they listened, via translation, to a reading by their hosts. Fascinatingly, the text they were read from appears to have actually been John of Hildesheim’s History of the Three Kings, a source I covered on a recent Patreon mini-episode. In it, they would have heard all about those biblical magi, where they went after Bethlehem, and the intersection of their story with that of Pester John.
According to Candido, the Ethiopians agreed that everything read to them was true, prompting him to inform his friend that it was confirmed that these visitors were indeed the people of Prester John. It’s hard to say exactly what the Ethiopian contingent actually thought of all of this, but perhaps there were some translation problems there.
Such uncertainties are of course very much part of this sort of thing, issues that can be magnified through chains of transmission, translation, and time as they carry down to reach us. Narratives might shift about as we uncover or reexamine this source or that. The narrative was certainly shifting about for those who were living it. The Prester John of story and myth had been cast into doubt on the Asian steppe, but now in the Ethiopian ruler, the real thing had been found. As Salvadore puts it, “...Prester John ... had by the 1430s transcended the legend and become a real monarch with a reasonably well-defined sovereignty and a rightful access to the formalities of Renaissance diplomacy: gift exchanges, epistolary relations, papal audiences.” He was not perhaps what he had been, but then he was someone one could reliably exchange envoys with, talk trade and transportation of relics, maybe even dream still of military alliance, and that was something.
Yet for all of this heightened contact and with a real person on the other end of the phone, the European understanding of Prester John had not entirely yet shed its old sense of mystery. An observer present at the 1427 meeting with King Alfonso had written of the visitors as quote, “Christians of Prester John, who is said to reign over 72 kings, of which 12 are infidels the rest Christians yet different in rituals and mores. Little is known of [what is] beyond the equator with the exception of the great region of Agisimba,” or Abyssinia. The new realities were being joined neatly to the old stories.
Little may have been known in 1427, but that was changing. Next episode, we’ll explore those changes.
Thank you for listening, everyone. If you are doing so on the Patreon, then expect me back soon with some bonus listening. If not, I’ll be back here next time with the next episode in the Pester John series, the second on the Ethiopian connection, in which we’ll actually get to Ethiopia, and I’ll talk to you then.