Asia - Detail from the Queen Mary Atlas, MS 5415 A British Library
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Last episode, we had a visit from a patriarch bringing news of the miracles of St. Thomas, a visit to Rome and maybe from India, maybe instead from somewhere more like Ethiopia. We had a misattributed military victory over a powerful sultan, one achieved by a Buddhist not a Christian. And we had a remarkable letter.
Last episode, I talked about the text generally referred to as the Epistle or Letter of Prester John, but it would really be more accurate to call it the Letters of Prester John, plural. The text, as it circulated and has come down to us, took different forms, carried varied interpolations on this topic or that. It was not set in stone and immutable. It was alive, shifting, responsive to the whims, the touch and taste, of this scribe or that.
There are over 200 known manuscripts of the letter in Latin, written from the 12th century to the 16th—peaking in the 15th century by the way, not the 12th—and more in other languages too, from Anglo-Norman to Catalan, Welsh to Swedish, Hebrew to Old Church Slavonic, a fantastic variety of manuscripts in a range of languages, and of course, the contents were also varied, starting from the very top, from the actual framing of the letter and its addressee, and running through a series of additions covering a tremendous range of material, from wondrous inhabitants to fantastic bakeries.
That’s part of what I want to talk about today, about what those additions contained, as well as the problem of where the letter came from, and the question of belief.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, a podcast that covers medieval history through the stories of its travellers, and a podcast which is supported by a Patreon. Today, I want to particularly thank 2 new Patreon members, Chris and Angus. Thank you both very much.
And now, back to the story, back to the centuries-long story of Prester John, to the letters.
Let’s start at the beginning.
The “letter” was, as you heard last time, often addressed to the Byzantine emperor, but sometimes not, or not quite, not in all copies. Sometimes, it was to “Lord Manuel, Pope of Rome, Emperor of the Romans,” to “Frederick” the Holy Roman Emperor, or to Manuel and then forwarded on to Frederick. They were addressed simply to “Michael,” to the pope himself, to Emperor Charles IV, or to Emanuel, King of Portugal, and there were other differences, other additions.
Some were architectural. There was that second palace, the one Prester John’s father dreamed of, which we talked about last time. There was a chapel all in glass that had miraculously appeared in celebration of the birth of Prester John, and that was not all that was miraculous about it. The chapel was such that if 100,000 people were to enter, it would be full, but it would be just as full with a throng of 10,000, with 1,000, with 100, with 3. Below 3, it did shrink, did not suffer to decrease, just as the Holy Trinity did not.
One of my favourite interpolations is a surprisingly long passage on a building which housed a combined mill and bakery, not so exciting on the face of it but containing much more exotic delights than you might think. High, golden, and of peculiar construction, it was powered by fierce winds that came rushing through more than 2,000 underground tunnels and up through the columns of the building. Its millstone spun so fast that it appeared invisible, and its wheel so swiftly that if you looked at it with steady eyes, you would lose your sight. There was white stone used in the furnace that, when heated once, was “forever mercilessly hot without fire,” and concrete “made of incorruptible gold,” so strong that it could not be broken without the use of goat’s blood, a substance which was also understood in other medieval texts to be able to crack diamonds. Among these fantastic materials roamed roosters—giant ones, larger than ostriches—that carried provisions to and fro between the levels of the building.
And maybe the scribe who inserted this portion was actually a baker or a miller, or somehow related to one, because there is mention of both the wealthy millers and the equally wealthy bakers who worked there, of how it would only cause trouble if the one profession was paid more than the other, and they were very well paid, each baker, for example, having “500 knights and many other riches,” which seems like something a baker might write, not that I’m totally against entertaining the idea of each baker maintaining 500 men-at-arms.
It really is a strikingly long passage, enough so that I’d love to know the story behind it. Maybe just a scribe somewhere with a strong if somewhat speculative enthusiasm for baked goods and the infrastructure that produced them.
To the list of creatures in Prester John’s lands, one interpolation added pigs large as oxen, lobster-clawed ants the size of dogs, and dogs the size of horses which were tamed and kept in the priest-king’s hunting party, at least a thousand of them. There were humans with eyes both front and back. There were ones without heads, with eyes and mouths on their chests, standing 12 feet tall and 6 feet wide, their colour, the purest gold. There were ones with 12 feet, 6 arms, and 4 heads, each head having 2 mouths and 3 eyes. There were flat-headed women in long beards, skilled at hunting, who trained lions to bring down lions, bears to catch bears, and so on.
There were, as I mentioned last episode, the people of Gog and Magog, and others, who considered it, quote, “most sacred to chew human flesh.” These people had been confined by Alexander the Great, but Prester John could release them at times to destroy his enemies. It was said, as it was said in the Alexander romances and repeated since, that in the time of the Antichrist, they would pour forth from behind the walls he had set for them, and that their numbers were like those of sand grains on the shore.
Some interpolations really focused on stones, stones of power, magical ones, miraculous ones, though not all of them seem all that useful. There was one that created such a cold for 10 miles around that none could travel far in it without needing to crowd in together and then die. Another, created a corresponding heat of such ferocity that none could suffer more than half a day’s journey without being reduced to ashes. A third was, quote, “neither cold nor hot, but [was] cold and hot,” and despite its power, harmed no one. A fourth provided brilliant light at midnight, while a fifth correspondingly turned day to night so that no one could see anything. So these stones functioned when placed beneath the open sky, but otherwise they had no effect whatsoever and were indeed quite ugly.
There was a stone which when placed in water produced “the sweetest and most pleasant” milk, while another “made the most undiluted wine, greatly fragrant and certainly the most pleasing to drink.” A third, submerged, drew fishes to it like a magnet. A fourth, when dragged across the forest floor wrapped in dragon sinews, which was asking a lot, drew all the creatures, from rabbit to stag and bear, who had to follow you wherever you went and could not resist. A fifth, if sprinkled with the hot blood of a lion, produced a fire hot enough to consume even earth, stones, and water, and certainly the enemies of Prester John. Only the blood of a dragon could extinguish it.
Near those sandy seas which I mentioned last episode, there was one more stone, something of a different kind, large enough to step inside and shaped like a shell, with water on its floor. It was guarded by two very old men, and as you approached they would ask if you were Christian or at least intending to become one, if you “desire[d] health in [your] entire soul.” Only those answering yes were allowed to remove their clothes and enter, to let the water rise around them. If they had spoken truly, then the water would rise and and then fall away, freeing them from whatever illness affected them. There appears not to have been a penalty for those who had, one is tempted to say, chosen... poorly.
In one of the palaces, there was a fountain more fragrant and flavourful than was to be believed, spreading an aroma “as if all kinds of sauce, spice, and oil were placed there and stirred up,” tasting of whatever the drinker desired, and it carried power beyond that, incredible power, if accessed within certain strict limitations, punishingly strict ones, almost Pythonesque but with great rewards.
Quote:
“If any starving person tasted of this fountain three times daily for three years, three months, three weeks, three days, and three hours, and on the third hour he tasted it so that he tasted it three times neither before that hour or after it, but in the space which is between the beginning and the end of each one of those three hours, accordingly he would not die before 300 years, three months, three weeks, three days, and three hours, and he would be forever at the age of young adulthood.”
On that last day, that successful drinker would gather those they knew around them and would announce to them, “My friends and neighbours, behold! Now I will die before long. I ask you to close a tomb over me, and pray for me.” Then, they would enter the tomb and say goodbye.
One of the benefits of the Prester John letter as a venue for interpolation was the immense and diverse nature of the Prester John Universe, the PJU. No matter how much one added, one could never go overboard or even hope to encompass all it was to contain.
So you could write, as indeed someone did, that in the south of Prester John’s lands, “in the farthest parts of the world,” there was a great uninhabitable island where it rained manna twice a week that was collected and eaten by those who lived nearby. They ate nothing else, and they lived in peace, without envy, hatred, quarrels, or leaders. They knew no figure of authority save for the one Prester John sent among them to collect his tribute. For that, they gave 50 elephants and as many hippos every year, each loaded with balsam, gold, or precious stones.
The people of that place lived for 500 years, and even that could be extended, for they could drink 3 times from a fountain on that island of manna and regain a full 100 years. When they finally did die, they were taken back to that island, not to be buried but to be stood among the shade and the pleasant smell of its trees, where no rot or decay would touch them. Their skin remained “fresh and coloured as though alive,” and it would stay that way until the time of the Antichrist.
In those same southern reaches was a place called the Cavern of Dragons, and it was exactly what it sounds like. It was long and deep and “full of secret places.” It was home to “infinite thousands of terrible dragons,” guarded by those who lived nearby, lest, quote, “wizards from India or elsewhere [were] able to steal any of [them].” Indian princes, the letter explained, were accustomed to having such creatures at their weddings and banquets, no such event being complete without them. Every year, Prester John received 100 dragon masters and 100 trained dragons in tribute. They were raised like horses, given names when young, saddled, bridled, taught, and placed under incantations. As couriers, these dragons flew throughout Prester John’s realms, gathering information and carrying news in its furthest reaches. This was one of the more fantastical additions to the letter, one of the parts that really does sit right at home among the fantasy genre of our own time.
Another addition concerned the Amazons, those people who lived with their queen on an island that stretched for 1,000 miles in every direction. It was surrounded on all sides by a wide river which flowed around it like a ring, and in that river lived a wonderful variety of fish. Some were shaped like donkeys and offered themselves to be ridden before being returned to the water, which they could not live without. Others were like cows, large dogs, or falcons, all of which were brought from the water to complete their tasks for the Amazons before being allowed to return. Basically, a full range of useful dry-land wildlife lived in those waters, a “fish” fit for every purpose, including one that was apparently shaped like a large hand and makes me question what I’ve written down. And then there were the Amazons themselves.
The men of the community were of course not really of the community. They lived on the banks of that river, on its far banks, and there they stayed on pain of death, joined by any boys born to the women. The girls were raised among the Amazons themselves and trained for war, for use of bow, and lance, and spear. Their weapons were made of silver, as were their “ploughshares, mattocks, axes, and other instruments,” made of the only money or metal they had. They rode the strongest and swiftest of horses and were equally fast on foot, able, if they started at the same time, to run and catch an arrow before it fell to the ground. As with many of these additions, the actual connection to Prester John came at the end, in this case that those fearsome Amazons sometimes came to war with him on his behalf, numbering a million or more.
Hearing this, you might be wondering if this “letter” from abroad had Prester John’s Three Indias as populated by anyone but centaurs, dragon-masters, arrow-racing Amazons, and the like, so it’s worth noting that the same interpolation which gives us the expanded section on the Amazons—there was a brief mention of them in the shorter letter—includes one on the “Bragmanni,” an acknowledgment of the people of India, if one that betrayed a somewhat limited understanding.
Quote:
“The Bragmanni are numberless and simple men who lead a pure life. They do not desire to have more than what the law of nature requires. They have compassion for and support all things. They say that what is not necessary is superfluous. They are saints living in the flesh. Almost all of Christendom is everywhere sustained by their sanctity and justice, so we believe, and it is defended by their prayers, lest it be conquered by the devil. These men serve our majesty with their prayers alone, nor do we wish to have anything else from them.”
There were the Bragmanni, the people of India, and there was also mention of a great king of India, a king named Porus, not an invention of the writer but known to us from other sources. There is writing as to how one of Prester John’s magnificent palaces had been built and lived in by that king, how it contained golden statues and golden birds, both singing at the king’s desire, of how a great stone that the king had placed had sprouted a miraculous tree from the top of which grew an apple too brilliant to look it, with the power to heal and sustain. Not the only miraculous apple in the letter by the way.
And after all these miracles, all this wealth and all these wonders, these strange creatures, one version of the letter concludes like this.
“Dated in our city of Bibric, on the 15th of the Kalends of April in the 51st year of our nativity. In confirmation: A certain cardinal, Stephen by name, said under the oath of his faith and pronounced openly to everyone that all the things which were stated above as though they were unbelievable are in fact the highest truth.”
You, and the reader, could be assured then that all this that the letter contained was to be believed.
After this break, we’ll talk more about that.
…
Where should I start?
I should probably start by making it clear that this “letter” was not really a missive from some indomitable eastern ruler with unassailable Christian credentials, one who promised to shelter his co-religionists beneath his substantial umbrella and crush their adversaries with his innumerable and near-supernatural forces. That much was probably already clear. But as it wasn’t that, then what was it? Why was it? If it was a lie, a forgery, was it an act of magnificent individual creativity, or, though in its way no less impressive, was it more of a cobbling together of pre-existing elements? If you’re thinking that those Prester John-ish forerunners I mentioned last time indicate the latter rather than an act of startling innovation, well, you’d be right. That was part of what made it so believable.
It was not just that there were forerunners to the priest-king himself, like those we covered last episode. It was also the way that the world to the east that the letter described matched with earlier depictions. You can go back to Ctesias’ 5th-century BCE work or to Ptolemy’s 2nd-century Geography, to the letter framed as written from Alexander the Great back to Aristotle. You can go back to Pliny or Herodotus, Solinus or the Alexander romances, and in all of them you find wonders, monsters, unfamiliar customs, and unlikely zoological and geographical features, the traditions of the “marvels of the east” by which Latin Christian Europe understood distant India, traditions which the Prester John writer carried forward.
So you had those hybrid creatures, those peculiarities of deed and land. You had references to the mighty King Porus, a starring character in the Alexander letter. It was not as though no one had ever doubted the dog-headed details as to what India contained—they had, in writing—but these were nonetheless the stuff of expectations, expectations which the Prester John author largely met with a mix-and-match of pre existing elements reframed within a Christian utopia seeded by Saint Thomas. A Church of the East seemingly without the theological divisions that set it apart from the church of the west, its leader strikingly emptied of any of the religious ideas that might trouble the Latin audience, and distinctly unfazed by the petty powers around and beneath him.
Clearly, the Prester John of the letter did not arrive out of nowhere, like a boulder dropping into a still pond. Instead, its ripples joined those already in motion, a legend, or legends, already circulating, talk already existent. The author picked up on a story that was already out there, on stories.
In his survey of studies of Prester John—from 1953, so more than a little old now—Charles Nowell identified 3 basic schools of thought as to the quote/unquote “real” Prester John, or at least the inspiration thereof. One was Yelü Dashi, the Qara Khitai leader who I mentioned last episode, the one who had achieved that resounding victory over the Seljuk sultan which was then trumpeted in Rome as that of a mighty Christian lord over a pair of Persian brothers. The second school located the inspiration for Prester John with the rulers of Ethiopia. We will be getting into much more detail on the Ethiopian Prester John connections later in the series, but here I’ll just note, as Nowell does, that the term India, at the time, referred just as often to east Africa, to Ethiopia, as it did to the India we know today, and that information as to the existence of a Christian monarch reigning in lands beyond those of the Muslim rulers would have been transmitted to Europe, if with some distortion along the way.
The third position Nowell outlined saw no particular historical prototype for the priest-king of the letter. The view here, that of Leonardo Olschki and others, was that the Prester John author was not attempting to describe any particular person, though, as Nowell notes, they may well have hitched their writing to a pre-existing figure of interest. Instead, this author, likely a western priest the argument goes, had crafted a religious sermon, a sermon framed as a utopian vision, seasoned with enticing marvels and wonders, and containing a few pointed remarks about the state of Christian life among the Greeks and back home. Such an author would presumably have been totally unable to enjoy the incredible impact of their writing, as they watched its audience greedily spoon up the dressing and disregard the salad, looking eagerly to the idea of saviour for the crusader states, not so much at the intended message. Or, as Nowell put it:
“Roman Christendom may not have been wholly insensitive to projects of moral and social betterment, but it had less interest in being reformed than in being victorious in the long protracted struggle with Islam. The Prester John it wanted was not so much a saint as a conqueror, to help in the battle and probably to bear the brunt of it.”
Leonardo Olschki’s disappointed priest, with his utopian methods, had plenty to be disappointed by. The world in which he lived looked very little like that realm of peace, justice, and piety in the distant nowhere of his writing, a disparity he surely saw everywhere around him but which was best exemplified in the person of the priest-king himself. Supreme powers both religious and political were invested in that person, and, as Nowell pointed out back in ‘53, the contrast with the ruling elite in the letter-writer’s surroundings was stark. If you had a Prester John, then you didn’t have a Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa bitterly vying with a Pope Alexander II. You didn’t have the schisms created when the former appointed his anti-popes. You didn’t have the petty, bloody, struggles of this king with that. You could see the attraction.
You could also see how this “letter” might instead be read in other ways. Maybe it wasn’t intended to portray a better world in which neither Frederick nor Alexander were dominant, their struggle reconciled and made void. Maybe it was instead written to support one of those parties, to resolve the conflict with the primacy of one over the other.
That was what Bernard Hamilton argued, slightly more recently, in ‘85, that the letter was part of a larger imperial campaign against the pope, to quote, “show that Frederick’s concept of church-state relations, unlike that of Alexander II, produced harmony in the Christian world.” There ought be a priest-king, yes, and that figure should come more from the kingly direction than the priestly one. The concept, as Hamilton had it, was in keeping with some of Frederick’s other actions such as the 1165 canonisation of Charlemagne, and Hamilton even had an orchestrator in mind for all of this in a man named Rainald, the Archbishop of Cologne and a well-known advocate of Frederick’s.
Supporting Hamilton’s idea of the letter as imperial propaganda is its similarity to work known to have been produced by those close to Frederick. Historian Keagan Brewer points out its similarity to a contemporaneous prophetic text from that circle which shared the letter’s wondrous figures of the east, utopian vision, and occasional jabs at the Greeks. But then Brewer asks a really interesting question. “Was [the letter] ever read this way by its medieval audiences? Or did they accept it as a factual diplomatic artifact written by a real [eastern] potentate?”
Brewer, whose book, Prester John: The Legend and its Sources, I am making quite heavy use of, writes that the reaction was, predictably, split. There were some, by his assessment, who fully accepted what they read as true, others who all but entirely dismissed it for its fantastical nature and its grandiose claims. And how could we tell? How could we know this? How might you measure belief or its absence?
You might look at where the letter shows up. For example, Kim Phillips has done so with regards to its inclusion in one particular manuscript and seen the letter there packaged as sheer entertainment, bundled with humorous tales and romances. Count one on the side of disbelief, though one what it’s hard to say, one individual perhaps who felt the text rightly belonged among those other writings. On the other hand, you have it mentioned as fact by 12th-century chronicler Geoffroy du Breuil, and likewise by Aubry du Trois-Fontaines, the 13th-century one who wrote, by way of introduction, “And at this time, Prester John, King of the Indians, sent his letters full of astonishing things to various kings of Christendom.”
To quote Brewer again, this time at length:
“From the end of the twelfth century, [Prester John] appeared in an extraordinarily broad range of texts. He was sung about by troubadours. He is found in chronicles. He made appearances in fictional literature as an exemplar of the perfect moral society. He was used as a propaganda tool. He was seen in pedagogical texts, and satires on university life. We find him in descriptions of real events occurring in the Far East, such as the world-shattering Mongol conquests. He continued to play a part in legendary tracts about the East. He appeared in encyclopedias, geographical treatises, travel literature, in real diplomatic communications between popes and emperors, and in maps.”
Prester John would appear again and again across the centuries, and, as Brewer makes clear, not always in the context of a passing amusement, a light entertainment.
Of course, context is not all we have to go on. It’s not just whether the scribe included the letter among comedies or chronicles. It’s also what you find written alongside it, right alongside it on the page, somewhat like you might study the scribblings of whatever stranger had the library book before you. What they seem to show us—not in the work of all scribes, but in some—is a certain degree of scepticism, a certain amount of “Believe it if you will.”
That was the message accompanying one particular 15th-century manuscript, that, and the description that this was an “unbelievable sermon” and “not Gospel.” On another of the same period, the scribe invited the reader to “Read happily and hear the marvels of the world.” As to a 12th-century copy, they were perhaps more 50/50 on the whole thing, writing “If you want to believe it, believe it,” seeming to leave the door open to at least a little doubt. But what was it they were doubting? Was it the existence of Prester John? The basic facts of such a ruler and his kingdom? Or was it more like the marvels it was supposed to contain? Stones of power, mirrors of magic, combination bakeries and mills staffed partly by roosters, dragons and miracles, rivers of stone, seas of sand, a saintly king of undefeatable military might.
For Brewer, it was more that last category which was sometimes, not always, called into question, more the details as to what his realm contained than his or its very reality. And why not? After all, the existence of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven does not preclude us from believing in the existence of a Salah ad-Din. According to Brewer’s studies, it would not be until the 18th-century that you’d have a really clear statement that Prester John himself did not exist and never had.
For whatever doubts may have existed as to some of the miraculous specifics, Prester John could be found on Giovanni da Carignano’s 1310 map, could be found in Ethiopia, the same with Angelino Dulcert’s 1336 one, and the 15th-century world maps of Albertin de Virga, Andrea Bianco, Giovanni Leardo, and Fra Mauro, the 16th-century ones of Vesconte Maggiolo, Sebastian Munster, and Diogo Homem. In Diogo’s atlas for Queen Mary of England, Prester John could be found seated on a throne. At times, he was labelled as Indorum Rex, the “King of the Indians.” He was ruling in Ethiopia. He was just east of the Holy Land. He was near the Tigris. He was somewhere in the far east, on an island maybe. On one Genoese map, he was in both Africa and Asia, really covering all the bases.
And these geographical imaginaries did not exist in isolation from the reality of travellers in the lands they represented, did not necessarily impede the experience of them. As John L. Allen wrote:
“No exploratory venture begins without objectives based on the imagined nature and content of the lands to be explored. Imagination becomes a behavioural factor in geographical discovery as courses of action are laid out according to preconceived images … . The results of exploration are modified by reports written and interpreted in the light of persistent illusions and by attempts made to fit new information into partly erroneous systems and frameworks of geographical understanding.”
For our purposes, those “partly erroneous systems and frameworks of geographical understanding” very much included Prester John.
You can look at the accounts of the travellers who went out into the world and reported back on Prester John, on his history, his story, on failing to find him, on finding him but then finding stark disappointment in his reality when held against all that they had heard. It was not true what had been said about this powerful lord, so rich and pious, they might say. There was no such person, or if there was, then he was not at all as he was supposed to be.
Perhaps the most important thing here is that they looked at all.
Some of the writers of those accounts have appeared on this podcast, particularly in the early episodes of journeys among the Mongols. Others will appear quite shortly, as we continue this series on the priest-king Prester John, on the stories, their impact, and the people who went looking for him.
The story of Prester John had legs. This mysterious figure, humble as a simple church elder or priest but more mighty than any caesar or emperor and ruling over a vast, Christian utopia and its religious servants would, perhaps understandably, really stick around, haunt the Latin Christian imagination. As I’ve mentioned, belief in Prester John seems not to have been universal, but, at least on some level, it was prevalent, becoming part of the anticipated picture of India and then Ethiopia. Next episode, we’ll continue to follow that story.
Sources:
Prester John: The Legend and its Sources, compiled and translated by Keagan Brewer. Taylor & Francis, 2019.
Nowell, Charles E. "The Historical Prester John." Speculum 28, no. 3 (1953).
Romm, James S. The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought Geography, Exploration, and Fiction. Princeton University Press, 2019.
Wang, I-Chun. "Alexander the Great, Prester John, Strabo of Amasia, and Wonders of the East." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.5 (2012).