Joseph Scaliger, a Calvinist scholar with a Prester John theory - (Wikimedia)
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This is the story so far. A kind of “Previously, on Prester John.”
There was a letter, maybe one originally produced as a targeted piece of cultural weaponry, an artifact of a clash between pope and emperor. There was an idea of enemies of the enemy, or of friends even, out there in the mysterious beyond winning victories against the antagonist. There were prophecies and rumours, for some not to be taken particularly seriously, but there was news that seemed to confirm them. There was the rise of a power in Central Asia that appeared, for a moment, to tick all the boxes. There were Mongols who, though they did indeed tick some of the boxes, did not quite turn out to be everything that had been wished for. So it would go.
For some the priest-king actually died out there on the steppe, an event learned of after the fact, and that was a very useful narrative for the Mongols. For some, his arrival was still imminent, his crusading intervention in the battles of the moment keenly anticipated and preached outside the walls of a conquered city.
But Prester John was not in India, not in China, or the central Asian steppe. Maybe he had died there, or maybe not. He hadn’t shown up in Egypt or the Holy Land. Maybe he was elsewhere, still out there, a Christian king somewhere out beyond the Islamic realms. Was there such a person? There was. Though at some point, he had become less of an individual, more a title, there was. And his people were to be found in Jerusalem. They were on pilgrimage in the Latin Christian lands. There were stories about his lands.
There were efforts to reach him, decades of frustrated efforts to really engage with him at his new location. He was proving difficult to reach, but the dream of doing so tied in nicely to a special blend of other drives desires for those sailing the seas in the Age of Exploration, not all of them savoury ones. He was difficult to reach but then some did, first a few but then more. He was reaching back. Becoming known. Finally, becoming familiar.
The priest king had survived so very much over the previous centuries. But could he survive this?
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, a podcast with a history of medieval travel stories and the history around them, whether they be friars, frauds, or distant and fantastical rulers of mysterious realms. A podcast with a Patreon. One where you can enjoy and are perhaps already enjoying earlier, oftener, and, I guess we’ll just go with ad-freer audio, all for the price of a single coffee a month, ranging from something pretty suspect and sugar-masked all the way up to something a bit fancier. The choice is yours, but unlike with the coffee, you’ll get to enjoy all those same benefits regardless of which one you pick. Lavender latte or convenience store drip, all the benefits are the same. This time, I want to thank everyone who has done so. Whether it be for a month, a year, or on into decades that become centuries as we all take on some kind of bizarre, Prester-John-ish, semi-fictional existence, I really appreciate your support.
And now, back to the story. The Prester John story. Last time out, we lingered a little over the efforts of Ambassador Mateus in making his way from, then regent, Eleni’s Ethiopia to King Manuel’s Portugal and back again. And that was kind of a diagonal move on my part, not quite a sideways step, but not one that moved the timeline forward a great deal. I hadn’t wanted to get too bogged down in the individuals for this Prester John series—we’d never reach the end—but I enjoyed the Mateus story too much to skip past it. Today, I’m resisting the temptation to slide smoothly on into the experiences of Francisco Álvares and so on and so forth. We will come back for him at some future date—he’s actually someone who’s been on my to-do list for some years now—but with this episode I want to drag the focus back to the figure of Prester John himself and to start to move toward the conclusion of his story. We are heading for the exits, but we won’t quite get there today.
The question today is what was happening to Prester John as the Portuguese made their way to his doorstep, and he, in the years shortly after the Mateus story, had to reach out to them for aid and assistance? What exactly was a Prester John who would not be offering massive armies marching beneath the cross in a great show of otherworldly power, but would instead be needing help of his own? Under these more real-world circumstances, could the magic of such a figure still hold? Would he just fizzle out for lack of belief to near nothingness, like one of Terry Pratchett’s small gods? Or would the narrative simply change, adapt to the new circumstances? It had, after all, managed as much before. The empty spaces on the Latin-Christian map were starting to fill out, hiding places becoming fewer, but perhaps it would again. We shall see.
By the mid-1530s, Ethiopia was requiring military assistance. The forces of the Adal Sultanate were encroaching, very successfully so. Under Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, they were rapidly winning one victory after another, and the Ottomans were involving themselves and flexing their imperial muscles. Dawit II sent to Portugal for help, including in his embassy the lying barber-surgeon who I talked about in the last Patreon mini episode. Ethiopia would receive help and would manage to fend off the Adal Sultanate, but this was hardly the great force that had been supposed to take Jerusalem, to crash over the Islamic strongholds and to wash them away.
The magic was fading, and we’ve already seen some of the effects of that over recent episodes. While previous generations had known Prester John’s realm as a land of Christian miracles, now, it was religiously suspect, its heterodoxy deemed to be needing correction and education. While Latin Christian rulers had once hoped for Prester John to shift the Nile to the downfall of their enemies, one of the Ethiopian Prester John’s canonical abilities, now there was an Ethiopian ruler looking for Portuguese craftsmen who could accomplish that very same thing. It was hard for the mythical priest-king to maintain his mystique among all the familiarity. While before, Prester John had inspired awe, now Cardinal Afonso’s letter to Dawit II was absolutely lecturing in tone.
Quote:
“Very powerful king and beloved brother in Christ, we heard, from people who came from those parts, that your reign keeps solemn customs … that are different and not compliant with the teachings of the roman catholic church…. We beseech you that you renounce these customs that seem to somewhat taint the purity of your faith, and that you accept and keep the pure and sound doctrine that is kept by the catholic and universal Holy Church of Rome … There are other things we know that are customs in your reigns, of which we shall not talk for now; however, we hope, in the name of our Lord, that you are willing to conform to the Holy Church and to obey, in all things, to the catholic faith and to holy apostolic faith…. And we plead and we expect of you that you are willing to comply with the holy apostolic faith, in all things, especially now that our Lord has opened a door to India, allowing us to communicate with your kingdom regularly, so that your kingdom may become instructed in the matters of the faith.”
There was not much wonder or awe there.
Prester John had been the ideal Christian ruler, but in the decades to come, the new-born Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, would have a mission in his Ethiopia, and where the goal had once been building a crusading alliance, the focus was now on religious conversion. The relationship had truly changed. However, that did not mean that the question of Prester John was truly settled. That did not mean the priest-king of mind and myth had been so wholly wedded to the Ethiopian ruler that he couldn’t still be prised loose and reassessed. He may have been swallowed up by the Mongols and/or shown to be less than irresistibly powerful in Ethiopia, but that didn’t mean he was quite ready to disappear. There was disenchantment in this period, yes, but there was also disagreement, the renewal of old arguments, the proposal of new solutions. The attachment to new causes or targets.
In the 1544 Cosmographia of Sebastian Munster, there are still some of the wonders that had first appeared a few centuries earlier in the letter of Prester John. You find mention of the riches and precious gems, and the fantastic creatures, a horse with two horns, beasts with seven, men with horns too. There are cannibals with one eye to the front and two to the back, ones with dog-heads, and ones with no heads at all, only faces on their chests. There is the Queen of the Amazons with her 300,000 warrior women. There are giants, though apparently not quite so giant as the giants of the past. And there is the phoenix. All the old classics, or a lot of them at least, and all of it said to be in Ethiopia, where Thomas the Apostle was now said to be buried.
Affixed to all of this, however, are qualifiers. “It is written,” Munster might write, or “some say.” “It is said,” or “it is thought.” And then Munster writes this. “Many other such trifles and incredible things the Jews do fable upon the lands of Prester John, which are so far beyond credit and likelihood of truth, that I thought it better to omit them, than to occupy the reader in idle spending the time about them.”
According to the Cosmographia then, the land of Prester John was rather less wondrous than had been supposed, and lies as to the contrary were to be blamed, as things sometimes were and would be, on Jews.
On that unappealing note, we’ll take a quick break.
…
As the 16th century wore on, other texts would revisit the question of Prester John’s location. The Portuguese historian Joao de Barros would write that the association with Africa had only ever been an error, an unfortunate misunderstanding based on the news of a powerful ruler carrying a cross. And in the 1570s’ The Garden of Curious Flowers, that text’s author, citing both Marco Polo and Mandeville as authorities, argued that though the common opinion held Ethiopia to be the priest-king’s home, he had always been an Asian monarch, one who had been conquered by the Mongol khan. It was a familiar take, just shifting Prester back to his old home and settling on Marco Polo’s as the definitive version, but others would take up that old story and put a different spin on it, finding new ways to make sense of how the mighty ruler who was now identified with Africa had once been traced instead to Asia, the priest-king finding new refuge in the latter’s past now that the former’s present had become inhospitable.
His people had been an Asian people, contested Joseph Scaliger in the 1580s, but they’d long since been driven from there to Ethiopia. It was not just that the story had changed or a case of mistaken identity. There had actually been an Ethiopian empire in Asia, Scaliger wrote, as evidenced by their crosses still to be found in China and Japan. And there had been a Prester John back then too, but as affirmed by Marco Polo, he had been conquered by Genghis Khan and his people pushed out.
Scaliger’s depiction of contemporary Ethiopia was essentially that of fallen greatness, of a people who had once presided over a vast empire but were now, as he put it, “thoroughly ignorant of the business of seafaring.” It was one way to explain away that discrepancy between a Prester John of something like the letter, and the rulers and ruled of Ethiopia who could never hope to live up to it, a people who would, some three decades later, be dismissed by sailors on an early British East India Company expedition, as quote, “brute and savage, without religion, without language, without laws or government,” and it went on, about “want of cleanliness,” and so on.
I don’t include the observations of Standish and Croft, both first-named Ralph, here by way of endorsement or to reference them as experts on Ethiopia—they were actually in and around Mozambique at the time, not Ethiopia—but because this was an example of that discrepancy between expectations and experience, for the two Ralphs were writing of what they thought of as the land of Prester John, where strange beasts and deformed creatures were seen.
In the closing decade of that 16th century, another English traveler would make rather different reference to Prester John’s land. Edward Webbe, who appeared on the podcast in the very, very, early days, would go abroad in war as a master gunner, and seems to have had no shortage of adventures to relate, but that wouldn’t stop him from embellishing. His Prester John was a bit of a throwback to that of the letter, with wonderful animals, tremendous power, and a bountiful court where sixty kings served at his table, the first dish, which you’d probably tire of seeing night after night, always a human skill picked clean and placed in earth as a reminder of even the priest-king’s mortality. The narrative of that letter clearly still retained some of its power.
In the 17th century, Prester John lived on, in more scholarly texts than Webbe’s, and still his exact nature and location were discussed. The priest-king was well on his way to becoming a creature of modernity.
In the early years of that century, some still had him lingering in Ethiopia. The Voyages of Jacques de Villamont, for example, referred to the name Prester John as the Persian term for Ethiopia’s king. And some still looked to that ruler with hope of military and spiritual rescue. George Benson would preach in England that a tribute ought to be paid to the priest-king for all he did in keeping “the Turk” from their doors.
However, the weight of the material seems to have had him moving on from Ethiopia, or rather, never having been there at all. Samuel Purchas, an English cleric who was fascinated by and worked with Asian travel narratives, examined a version of the original letter, in which he found “so many monsters, and uncouth relations” that he could not place much value in it. He read Mandeville, but correctly identified that the material there was largely borrowed from the letter. Still, he thought that all the fables connecting Prester John with Asia, somewhere near Persia, must have some basis in truth, especially when read alongside Otto of Friesing, a very early, pre-letter, Prester John source.
By the mid-century, another English writer, Peter Heylyn would reach similar conclusions, and he would have little patience for Scaliger’s idea that Prester John’s people had started in the one place and gone to the other. “It [was] a wonder,” he wrote, “that a man of such infinite reading [as Scaliger] should be so deceived.” That he should fall “upon a fancy that that this [Ethiopian] Emperor was formerly of so great power, as to extend his empire over India, and the North of Asia,” it was, he wrote, “a monstrous, and indefensible fancy.” How could so great a power have reigned and been recorded nowhere but in Scaliger’s head? Besides, “it [was] well known, and generally granted, that the Prester John of Asia, was by Sect a Nestorian; but he that [was] so called in Africa, of the Sect of Jacobites.” A simple misunderstanding had placed Prester John in Ethiopia in the first place, and there was no need for a theory such as Scaliger’s to explain it otherwise.
This narrative, that returned Prester John to Asia, though an Asia of the past, built up steam, with some variation as to the causes of the misunderstanding and exactly who was to blame for it, not always Jews, and not always Scaliger.
According to Jeronimo Lobo, a Portuguese Jesuit who spent substantial time in Ethiopia, it was the French, who had, in their great Levantine trade, met many Ethiopians, particularly in Palestine, and come away with the wrong idea about their ruler, who they called Jan and whose office was that of priest. “Priest Jan,” argued Lobo, and others—for the idea was not his alone—had easily become Prester John in the ears and mouths of those French traders, and so the word had spread.
According to Balthazar Tellez, a Portuguese historian of the Jesuits, it was our friend Covilha who had misstepped so badly, convincing himself he had met the legendary priest-king and then easily leading others astray, for “Pleasing news [was ever] rather believed than examined.” Which was all a little unfair of Tellez, and others who would blame Covilha, as we know that the identification of Prester John with Ethiopia long predated Covilha’s involuntarily extended visit there.
What we find in both of these Portuguese texts is reference to real world exploration and experience, an answer to one of those questions from the beginning of the episode: could Prester John survive the familiarity of the Ethiopia-Portugal encounter? The answer seems to have been that he couldn’t, or at least the Ethiopian Prester John couldn’t.
“The advance made by the Portuguese into the Indies,” wrote Lobo, “assures us, that at present, no such Prince is known in those many Kingdoms and Provinces of the East.”
As Tellez put it, in rather more triumphalist tones:
“The Portuguese Nation having extended their Discoveries and Conquests along the Coasts of Africa, and proceeded thence to the, before unknown, remotest Eastern Shores; Europe was not only enriched with the precious Spices and other valuable Commodities of those Parts; but improved with the Knowledge of new Monarchies and Empires, Spacious Provinces, Wealthy and Large Islands, Warlike Nations, and variety of Countries, to which the ablest Cosmographers were before utter Strangers; so that we may say, the World is beholding to the Portuguese for this increase of Wealth, and addition of Extent.”
Because of this, Tellez wrote, Ethiopia had become fully known to Latin Christian Europe, the “true and certain Information of the Affairs of that Empire,” based on which, crude common opinion might be set right. As for the Prester John of Asia, he was no more, and this too was known through experience, in this case that of the Jesuits. Only the “bare Names of the Fields,” Tellez wrote, marked where Prester John had once reigned.
The African Prester John would, somehow, in some ways limp on. John Ray’s 1693’s A Collection of Curious Travels and Voyages, spoke of Prester John sending gifts from Africa, sending griffins in fact, and uniting in an anti-Turk alliance with the King of Persia. And even as late as 1755, a traveller named Mrs Benlow would write of her journey that “From Constantinople, [she] passed to the east, and from thence journeyed to the centre of Africa, to see Prester John. This route took up several years, and cost many thousand pounds.”
However, scattered examples like those aside, the priest-king had by this point finally departed from Ethiopia. Having in part been forced there by the conquests of the Mongols, he had now been driven out by the efforts of the Portuguese. He had fled to his stronghold, in an Asia of the past. From there, he had not yet been rooted out.
Behind him, in Africa, Prester John left behind a fitting monument. Fitting, I think, because it is not even anywhere near where he was supposed to be found. It’s very near as far away as possible, on the southern coast of South Africa, in what was, until a few years ago, known as Port Elizabeth. Bartholomeu Dias had taken on water not far away.
Fitting also because it’s an odd monument, something which it somehow seems should perhaps not exist, but does. A Coptic cross, and in the circle at its centre, the priest-king himself, along with a Portuguese navigator. On the base, this inscription: In memory of those seafarers who searched for Prester John 1145-1645. It was unveiled in 1986 by the Portuguese ambassador to South Africa. A peculiar object.
We’ll finish up there for today. It is a shorter episode than normal, but consider this a part one of the Prester John season finale. Next episode, part two, the podcast presses on into the 18th century and beyond, and that story comes to a kind of conclusion.