Prester John Battling Genghis Khan in a 14th-century French Alexander and Other Romances
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We have seen Prester John flitting about in the map and mind of medieval Europe. We have seen him do so for long enough so as to no longer actually be only medieval in nature. I’ve presented a pretty generous cross-section of his appearances over the centuries, but I haven’t been exhaustive. There were other destinations on the journey at which we did not stop.
There was the appearance in the very late 16th-century work of Frisian nationalism by Suffridus Petrus, in which Prester John, heir to the Frisian king, ventured into the Holy Land with his friends the Danish king and Charlemagne, and seized Jerusalem.
There was the very early 17th-century fiction by Richard Johnson, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s who weaved the court of Prester John, along with some Arthurian touches, into the romance of the Red-Rose Knight.
There was another Richard, Brome this time, who 30-something years later, would write the priest-king into his comedic play, having one character say to another:
“He talks much of the Kingdom of Cathay,
Of one great Khan, and goodman Prester John,
(Whatever they be), and says that khan’s a clown
unto the John he speaks of. And that John
dwells up almost at Paradise. But sure his mind
is in a wilderness: For there he says
are Geese that have two heads a piece, and hens
that bear more wool upon their backs than sheep.”
An interesting glimpse of how the legend of Prester John may have sounded to some.
And there was yet another Richard—yes, another—named Richard Ames, who, at the end of that century, referenced Prester John in his Jacobite Conventicle, with these lines.
Quote:
“If they go on, tis plain and clear,
The French, which we so idly fear,
As soon will make descent on Finland,
As ever attempt to land in England.
Within three years we shall become,
The poorest state in Christendom;
All nations will on us be pissing,
And we become the scorn and hissing,
Of all the kingdoms which are known,
Twixt us and Land of Prester John.”
Prester John, as we’ve seen, was ever popping up in new places and being put to new purposes.
This episode, we’ll witness his final such moves, his last ones, at least for now.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that explores medieval history through the travels of its storytellers and through the travails of its mythical priest-kings. And it is a podcast that is supported by a Patreon, by kindly folk such yourself who keep the podcast merrily afloat, and who enjoy early, ad-free, and extra medieval listening in the process, the most recent example of which was a short piece on an impoverished refugee in 12-century Egypt.
Today, I want to especially thank the newest patron, Bryan B. Thank you very much!
And now back to the story.
Today, it’s a conclusion, a conclusion of a sort, to the Prester John story.
Last episode, we saw how a growing familiarity with the Ethiopian Prester John’s homeland was starting to breed, if not contempt, then certainly disillusionment. Gone were the days when Latin Christian lords and popes looked to the priest-king’s coming on the first light of the fifth day to rescue them from their own personal Helm’s Deep, or sweep them to crusading victory. But we also saw that those days were not entirely gone for everyone. It was kind of like that William Gibson quote about the future already being here, just unevenly distributed, or I suppose rather more like the fact that medieval Europeans were indeed a multitude, and not of one mind.
While many now wrote that Prester John had never really been in Ethiopia—they wrote dismissive remarks as to the people who actually did live there, or if not there, then somewhere on the east coast of Africa—the miraculous Prester John of the letter would still make the occasional appearance. While many writers banished him to the Asian past, with Marco Polo emerging as the preferred authority, others would still sometimes fix him to the African present. More than half a millennium after that letter had first circulated, Prester John was not yet done. The writers and rulers of the late and then post-medieval world were not yet done with him. He had come to power during the high middle ages, but he was still very much alive and kicking as the early modern period became increasingly less early.
Even in the 17th and 18th centuries, Prester John was not static. This figure was still capable of change and adaptation, of squeezing into geographical and historical niches, ever avoiding being entirely disposed of. His next move was to be to Tibet or somewhere thereabouts.
There’s a hint of it in the 1671 armchair geography of Dutch writer Arnold van den Berg. Working from the experiences of Dutch East India Company travellers, he described China’s western provinces in this way.
Quote:
“Not far from the City [Xīféng], towards the North, is a Mountain called [Dàfēng], whose Head pierces the Clouds, and sends forth from the top a River, which running down very steep, makes a great noise in the fall; from the top of this being reckoned sixty Furlongs Perpendicular, you may take a Prospect over all the other Mountains, and see the City [Chéngdū]; it extends from the utmost Western Borders of the Province of [Sìchuān], to Prester John’s Country...”
And Arnold wasn’t alone in this assessment that the priest-king was to be found somewhere in the regions west of China, somewhere around Tibet. Of course he wasn’t. He hadn’t made the journey himself and presumably had the idea from those company travellers.
One of those who actually did make the journey, one of those who had gone with the Dutch East India Company in the 1650s, was Johannes Nieuhof. In his writing, China was “situated in the farthest part of Asia,” and bordering “upon the great Indian Sea.” It was separated from kingdoms to the north by its famous wall, built against “the Invasion of the Tartars,” and by “the Kingdom of Taniju, and a Wilderness called [Shāmò],” from Kashgar and Samarkand. Near its western regions were the kingdoms of Tibet, Laos, Mien, and Prester John.
One thing worth noting about these sources is that in neither was it clear exactly how the land, the country, the kingdom of Prester John related to the person. Was he there? Did he rule it now? Had he once done so? Was he an individual at all or rather, as he often was, more of role, a title that was inhabited, saying the Prester John being much like saying the king or the emperor?
In those two sources it wasn’t clear—nor was it in the 1660s writings of Manuel de Faria or Athanasius Kircher, who both also placed our friend in Tibet—but sometimes it would be. In the 1692 work of the widely travelled Jesuit professor Philippe Avril, it was. It was very clear and very specific—very much someone who you’re already aware of—and for Prester John, it ushered in a brand new association, a new thread to the web of hope and myth, with links spanning Eurasia and northern Africa.
For Avril, there was no room for doubt. He had examined some of the same twists and turns we have followed, if not always reaching the same conclusions.
He’d correctly traced the journey of Pêro da Covilhã first to India and then Cairo, and then on to Ethiopia, but like others we encountered last episode, he blamed the Portuguese traveller for being led by his hopes, finding what he had set out to find with the Ethiopian priest-king. Equally, he blamed those back in Portugal, “where the news was received with a great deal of joy and applause,” for too readily believing it themselves, for then causing the false idea to spread throughout Europe.
Avril touched on the etymological explanations for this misidentification, finding that of Scaliger, who we encountered last time, to be the strongest, that of confusion and corruption of a Persian term. He also cited other sources, ones which zeroed on Prester John’s particular region of Asia.
There was the Portuguese Jesuit, Andrade, who’d reported that the people there had, quote, “still an Idea of the Christian Mysteries, though confused and corrupted … feeble Remainders,” as he put it, “of the Faith which they had formerly embraced.”
There was the chronicle of St Antoninus, with his history of the Mongols and how they entered the story, and there was, on the same topic, “Paul the Venetian,” better known to us as Marco Polo, his immense influence very much in evidence from the sheer number of later writers who we find citing him as an authority, on this matter as on others.
What makes Avril particularly interesting though, is not this survey of what others had said of Prester John. It’s the figure who he then attaches him to, someone who seems to have first appeared in a European text in the 1620s. It is—as we tug back the curtain and peek behind the mask, suspenseful music rising—it is the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader and, for most of the last four centuries, Tibetan head of state.
Avril would incorrectly write that the word “Lama” meant “cross” in the Tartars’ language, and from the crosses his people carried, you could see they were, quote, “formerly instructed in those Mysteries, of which that sign is in some measure an eternal Memorial.” They had, in other words, fallen away from Christianity, but the, for Avril, unmistakable remnants lived on for all to see.
As Avril wrote, the Dalai Lama was admittedly not at that time a “Temporal Prince,” but that absence of Prester John’s earthly sovereignty was easily explained away as “the effect of the Wars and Revolutions that happen in all Kingdoms.” A fallen power to match his people’s faded Christianity. Besides, whatever he lacked in that sort of power was made up for by the veneration in which he was held. It was not a connection I would necessarily have guessed at, but for Avril, it was certain. And he was not alone.
In 1698, the London-published Ancient and Present State of Muscovy, written by Jodocus Crull, contained very similar claims, though with much less of a sense of sympathy for the “idolatrous” Tibetans, and nearly a century later, in the 1780 work of Johann Gottlieb Georgi—written as the American Revolutionary War moved towards a conclusion—you still find more of the same. More than the same, I suppose I should say, for there was actually an additional claim being made there.
In his Russia, or, a Complete Historical Account of all the Nations which Compose that Empire, Georgi would also provide some additional information about the Dalai Lama, more being learned of him by Europeans in the intervening years.
Georgi situated the Dalai Lama by latitude and longitude from what is now Beijing, and within a mountaintop pagoda. He described something of the process of reincarnation, of the Dalai Lama passing on into another body to again take up the position. And he expanded the scope of the Dalai Lama’s religious authority.
It was not just that Prester John and the Dalai Lama were one and the same, Georgi wrote. It was that Prester John, the Dalai Lama, and the Nestorian Catholicus, the head of the Thomasite Christians, were all one and the same. In this, the Dalai Lama was still something of a fallen Prester John, but being still Christian, even if Nestorian, and wielding influence over a greater number of people, perhaps not quite so fallen.
The Dalai Lama’s involvement isn’t a turn in the Prester John story that I’d known about before preparing for this series, was not one I would have predicted, but I probably should have because it’s kind of typical. Prester John was an absolute hermit crab of a man, stuffing himself into whatever shell might suit his needs just then, being stuffed in as the light was shone into his previous homes, revealing them, one after another, to be empty. That was how it had been.
Before getting on into how it would be and how it would, in a sense, end, we’ll take a quick break.
…
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Prester John’s activities were not limited to Tibet. In the 1670s and 80s, he was again associated with Ethiopia and credited in multiple sources with having there established the Knights of St. Anthony. Somehow still being associated with Ethiopia after 100 years of arguments that this connection had only ever been a mistake, likely one due to this or that etymological misunderstanding or misheard title, arguments that were still being hashed out as Prester John stumbled ever closer to the present.
One thing that does strike me in this era, not entirely novel but worth noting, is that those hammering home the fact that Prester John was not to be found in Ethiopia actually spoke to Ethiopians in forming their opinion.
Writing around the year 1680, the German scholar Hiob Ludolf was one example of this. He was one of those who unfairly blamed Covilhã for the whole Ethiopia error, and he wrote about “credulity gaining easily upon those that are ignorant,” and how “glad tidings [were] sooner believed than considered.” As for his source, Ludolf had learned much of Ethiopia from a Christian Ethiopian who he’d befriended in Rome.
In the next century, in 1752, the Czech friar Remedius Prutky would learn from Ethiopians in Ethiopia. He would be so set on having a definitive answer that he would ask the emperor himself. That emperor, he wrote, “was astonished, and told [him] that the kings of [Ethiopia] had never been accustomed to call themselves by this name,” which was quite definitive. Like other writers before him, Prutky hypothesised linguistic corruption at the root of the error. His particular version of the theory involved the Portuguese term for “Black” and the Arabic for “spring” or river, with the resultant Preteiani, or Prester John, then having as its origins a term for Black people who lived by the river. As for those people themselves, Prutky displayed an open distaste. Of actual Ethiopians themselves, he wrote that, quote:
“[They] are lazy, ignorant, idle, over-bearing, they labour long at nothing, they go naked and gorge themselves on raw flesh, and they aspire to nothing further; with all their laziness they hold gold itself in little or no esteem, despite its plentifulness… .”
It was some distance removed from the kind of Christian fellow-feeling that had once seemed evident in the relationship, but then that fellow-feeling had only ever been for an imagined Ethiopian, for a people more myth than anything else, their outline coloured in more by desire than experience.
Some started to write of deliberate fraud in the Prester John story. Voltaire, the Voltaire, was one of those to do so. By his account, it had been Nestorian religious men travelling with Armenian merchants who had pushed the idea of a great ruler out east, a ruler who they had, much to their credit, converted to Christianity, a narrative of obvious propaganda value. By his account, as with those of Marco Polo and others, that ruler their stories were based on had then fallen to Genghis Khan’s conquests.
Somewhat like the Ethiopians, Nestorians had once been Prester John’s favoured people, but Voltaire was not alone in blaming them now, was not first. In 1710, the French orientalist and future interpreter of Arabic at the French court, François Petit de la Croix, would also do so, and would reach all the way back to the foundations of the story, to the Letter of Prester John.
That letter, de la Croix wrote, had really been letters: to the pope, the French king, the emperor in Constantinople, the King of Portugal. The particular one he was looking at was addressed to the King of France, but could not, he asserted, have been any older than 1400 or so, some distance from its supposed 12th-century origins. And he may well have been right about the particular document he was looking at.
In its contents, that letter contained all the ingredients we’re familiar with, with de la Croix especially highlighting the elements by which its writer had clearly sought to trumpet the grandeur and magnificence of Prester John, which was most of them really, all those kingly servants, astonishing miracles, vast domains, great riches, and assorted rarities.
Like others before him, de la Croix had the “real” Prester John as Toghrul, also known as Ong Khan, the figure from Mongol history, but he did not think Toghrul had been sending letters west. It was, in keeping with what Voltaire would later write, Nestorians who had been the culprits.
They had, quote:
“...by means of their emissaries spread a report all over Christendom, that they had converted the greater part of the people in Scythia, and also the king himself, who was the most mighty and powerful King that ever reigned there; that this Conversion was so sincere, that he was become a Priest, and had taken the name of John. They added these circumstances, to render their fabulous stories more like truth; and composed these vain letters, to make that zeal of their sect more respected and commended, by their having gained so great a Prince to Christianity.”
Of what they had written, de la Croix said, nothing much could be believed or learned, not except that there was once a great king in the east who many paid tribute to, not except, he said, “that the world was at that time persuaded” by the letters. But now there was doubt. Now, there was disbelief. Where earlier critiques had found misunderstandings, these ones found deliberate fraud. It could not be long before someone thought the whole thing to be a baseless fabrication, thought that there never had been a “real” Prester John at all, not in China, Tibet, India, or the steppe, not in Ethiopia or anywhere else.
It had perhaps already been longer than you might have expected.
Maybe there’d been one sooner, maybe many, much sooner. Maybe some of them had even written as such. We are, as ever, rather at the mercy of those texts that time has preserved for us to read and cannot say what those in the “unknown unknowns” category would have told us.
All of that said, it would, according to Keagan Brewer’s fairly exhaustive review, not be until about 1760 that we’d get what we’re looking for: an outright refutation of the very reality and existence of the priest king. Or at least, something like that. It would come in the work of the Spanish monk, scholar, and general sceptic of myth and legend, Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro.
“It is wonderful,” wrote Feijóo, ”considering how slight our information is of Prester John of India, that even children and rustics are acquainted with his name, although it is not yet known with any certainty, who this prince is, where he reigns, nor why is he called by this name.”
There were many different theories, mused Feijóo over “who this Christian prince [was], in what part of Asia he reign[ed], and why he [was] called Prester John.” There were so many opinions, that it would be tedious for him to recount them all. There were so many opinions, and so varied, that Feijóo wondered if the whole person wasn’t entirely made up.
This was how he concluded:
“If, upon inquiry, it shall appear that Paulus Venetus, [our Marco Polo], was the first who gave an account of [Prester John], and that all other authors have taken what they said upon the subject solely from him: I say, if this should appear to be the case, it will afford a new motive of distrust, and it would be laughable enough, to find that authors have been beating their brains, and scrutinising all the corners of the globe in search of Prester John, when no such man exists, nor ever did exist in the world; at least, it is not probable, that he exists at present, because in all the modern voyages and travels that I have seen, I don’t meet with the least mention of him; and if there really was such a man, authors in that way, would not have thought him unworthy of their notice.”
It is worth noting that some of Feijóo’s doubt does stem from the suspicion that Marco Polo was the father of this particular lie, something we know not to be the case, but clearly, there was more to the Spanish monk’s scepticism than this. If nobody could agree on who or where the priest-king really was, then maybe he simply wasn’t anybody at all.
Whereas at his birth in the 12th century, there was plenty of space on the European map of the world where you might scribble in a powerful Christian lord, that was, by this point, really, really no longer the case. The age of imperial colonialism was well and truly bedded in, the British Empire not quite yet at its fullest extent. The age of revolutions was just around the corner, and Prester John, who had counted Thomas Becket and Salah ad-Din among his contemporaries, could now count Robespierre and Danton, born in 1758 and ‘59 respectively, as others.
Where now could the priest-king go? What corner of the world could he find in which to hide? Did the world now have such corners?
As Brewer notes, Feijóo’s declaration does not quite signal the end of Prester John. “Rather,” he writes, “there are many examples of eighteenth and nineteenth century writers who still echoed the conclusions of previous writers, that Prester John was a king who had once existed in Asia.”
Some still thought it so, but that number was decreasing. Prester John’s place in the world was dwindling, but he still had one more escape route left.
It was a place he’d been before, in the story of that “red rose knight” by Shakespeare’s contemporary, and in the words of Shakespeare himself, through the mouth of Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing:
“Will your grace command me any service to the
world's end? I will go on the slightest errand now
to the Antipodes that you can devise to send me on;
I will fetch you a tooth-picker now from the
furthest inch of Asia, bring you the length of
Prester John's foot, fetch you a hair off the great
Cham's beard, do you any embassage to the Pigmies,
rather than hold three words' conference with this
harpy. You have no employment for me?”
When there was nowhere for him to go in the present and history would not hide him, the priest-king took refuge in fiction.
He’s there, or his legend, in John Buchan’s 1910 colonial adventure novel which bears his name. He’s apparently there in a book called The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne Valente, which I haven’t read but which sounds intriguing. He’s there, very much there in perhaps the fullest possible thematic expression of himself in Umberto Eco’s Baudolino, a book I first read around the time of its English release in 2001 but upon rereading a year or two ago would fully recommend to listeners of this podcast as you might recognize a number of characters and events. And in the world of comics, he’s alive and well.
In Vampirella, which I have not read, he shows up in heaven-forged armour, wielding the sword of Saint Michael, and imbued with both great strength and the ability to be anywhere in the blink of an eye with the power of Godspeed. His mission is apparently to judge whether the title character has a soul and, if not, to destroy her.
He’s there in the Fables series, which I did read some of but too long ago to remember the knighting of the Frog Prince, with its reference to “the great lion on his stone, to Arthur in his crypt, to John the Presbyter in his lost kingdom.”
He is apparently not there in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, or Google tells me he isn’t though I somehow remember him there and strongly feel that he should be.
But he is there in the Marvel universe. He is, at first sight, slumped over in a special throne of preservation, golden armour/leggings torn at the knees like designer jeans. Later, he is absolutely hulking, his moustache also newly swollen, and wielding his “Stellar Rod” to which seems to be affixed a powerful artifact called the Evil Eye. He fights with members of the Fantastic Four, Deadpool, Thor, and Iron Man. “Brash and arrogant thou art, demon!” he proclaims in one panel, smacking the Thing in the face. “But Prester John has fought and bested the likes of thee often in times long past! ‘Tis child’s play for a knight of the realm to throw thee back!”
He’s at the camp of Richard the Lionhearted rescuing that king from assassins sent by the assassin, the Old Man of the Mountain. He’s advising a Frankish king and attempts to remake his kingdom into that of the Prester John letter—the sandy sea, the river of stone, and so on—and somewhere in Asia, he finds a yeti. At one point he declares himself as, “...he who has wandered time itself to recover the last remaining remnant of the fabled land of Avalon!” and he is sometimes known as The Wanderer. He is, most appropriately, preserved for centuries in suspended animation somewhere in Africa. I have not read any of the Marvel comics in question, but I can only approve of all of this, of Prester John’s many adventures across time and space
Prester John was never, in the strictest senses of the word, real. By which I mean that It was simply not the case that a Christian monarch wielding miraculous power, stupendous wealth, and unstoppable armies was out there somewhere beyond the Islamic world, either in Asia or Africa, ready to come riding over the horizon to rescue his European coreligionists from all that had gone wrong, to redeem the high middle ages, or the late ones, or the early modern ones, or the modern ones. Such a man did not, in the flesh and blood exist.
He was a cultural phantom, a skillful piece of propaganda, maybe, a lie, the subject of misunderstanding, of quite a few misunderstandings really. He was a meme, a rapidly transmitted construct, and over the centuries—over the six centuries I’ve covered here—he saw kings and queens born and die, empires expand and collapse, and mighty rulers fall and go forgotten. And despite his “unreal” nature, he was not a passive witness to all of this. He was a participant, an actor of tremendous influence.
Igor de Rachewiltz puts it this way. Quote:
“[Prester John’s] main role, if we can speak of roles in this context, had been to act as a subtle and irresistible force in attracting Western travellers deeper and deeper into remote and unknown lands. As we have seen, he was directly or indirectly involved in most of the travels and explorations of Asia in the thirteenth century, travels and explorations which … revealed the true face of Asia to Europe for the first time in history. The fruits of this new revelation can be seen in early fourteenth century maps, … [which] also show the passage to Africa of the wandering Prester: in Fra Paolino’s map of about 1320 he is still placed in Asia, but in that of Angelino Dulcert of 1339 he is already situated in [Ethiopia].
There, in his new country of adoption, Prester John continued to play his subtle game, firing the imagination of Europe and attracting other adventurous men. It was, again, in search of the elusive Christian king and of his rich and fabulous country that the captains of Prince Henry the Navigator undertook those voyages along the African coast in the first half of the fifteenth century which led to many new and exciting discoveries.”
I would not speak of those discoveries in such unconditionally glowing tones, but otherwise, I think it’s well put.
Prester John may not have been real, but that hardly diminished his historical impact when so many believed that he was. He was out there like a black hole, warping perception and expectation in his proximity, altering the viewer’s reading of the past, distorting their hopes as to the future. When there are so many ripples in the pond, it almost ceases to matter if there had ever really been a stone.
For now, the Marvel comics are really the perfect place for Prester John to retire to. A place where reinvention is always possible and death is not the end. There, may he live on and take new forms as the moment demands, given new futures and pasts by new sets of storytellers. It feels only right that he should continue to do so.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this Prester John series, and yes, this is actually the end. I will be back at some point with a bit of a postscript to it, something on a theme to the story which I think is really important but I haven’t gotten to here, but that will really stand by itself and won’t be the next episode. Up next, if you’re listening on the Patreon, I’ll be back shortly with bonus time. If not I’ll be back shortly after with another Medieval Lives episode, a standalone one, I think, a bit of a palette cleanser after this ten-part series. Either way, thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you then.
Sources:
Prester John: The Legend and its Sources, compiled and translated by Keagan Brewer. Taylor & Francis, 2019.
Ames, Richard. The Jacobite Conventicle. R. Stafford, 1692.
Rachewiltz, Igor de. Prester John and Europe's Discovery of East Asia. Australian National University Press, 1972.
Salvadore, Matteo. The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402-1555. Taylor & Francis, 2016.
Shakespeare, William. Much Ado about Nothing. Penguin, 2005.