Legends once told of Prester John (Presbyter Ioannes in lati), a Christian Priest-King said to possess great mystical power and fabulous riches. From the 12th to the 17th centuries there were rumours of a Christian nation standing defiant amongst the pagans, Muslims, and Buddhists of the Orient, and latterly, Africa. Prester John was sometimes depicted as a descendant of one (or oddly enough ALL) of the Three Magi (Wise Men), ruling a land overflowing with wealth, amazing marvels, and bizarre beasts:
“Our land is the home of elephants, dromedaries, camels, crocodiles, meta-collinarum, cametennus, tensevetes, wild asses, white and red lions, white bears, white merules, crickets, griffins, tigers, lamias, hyenas, wild horses, wild oxen, and wild men — men with horns, one-eyed men, men with eyes before and behind, centaurs, fauns, satyrs, pygmies, forty-ell high giants, cyclopses, and similar women. It is the home, too, of the phoenix and nearly all living animals.”
Prester John was at first thought to reside in India - the seeds planted by Thomas the Apostle's subcontinental travels (documented in works such as The Acts of Thomas) and by East Christians' semi-successful evangelistic activities there. Post the Mongol invasions (from 1206 AD), he was said to hold sway over Christian bulwark in Central Asia, but it was thereafter believed that Prestor John’s realm was actually Ethiopia, or thereabouts. Or North America.
Some of the early tales of Prester may have stemmed from lingering long memories of the successor Greek Kingdoms to Alexander the Great in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, which lasted from the 3rd century BC until 10AD. Not Christian though, more syncretic Olympian Pantheon-Buddhist.
Eventually, Prester became a character (or was alluded to) in novels, and of all things, Marvel comics.
Was there any truth to the legends?
Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos received a letter in 1165. The sender was: "John, Christian Sovereign and Lord of Lords".
The author claimed to live in a huge palace built of gold (structurally unsound) and studded with gems and governed a land that reached from Persia to China. The boastful letter appears to be a clever (for the time) fraud, to what end, we know not, other than hoodwinking people into venturing to the area.
Historian René Grousset posited Prester may have originated with the Keraites, a Turkic/Mongol clan converted by the Church of the East, who, by the 12th century, followed a custom of bearing Christian names.
Little connects the early Christian figure John the Presbyter of Syria to the Prester John legend besides the name. Later accounts of Prester John borrowed heavily from traveler’s tales and the fictional adventures of Sinbad the Sailor and The Alexander Romance, a heavily embroidered account of the Macedonian king’s life that was first written in the 3rd century A.D.
German chronicler Otto of Freising reported in his Chronicon of 1145 that the previous year he had met Hugh, bishop of Jabala in Syria, at the court of Pope Eugene III in Viterbo. Hugh, an emissary of Prince Raymond of Antioch, told Otto that PJ was a Nestorian Christian Priest-King (common in the Near East) who regained the city of Ecbatana from Media and Persia in a great battle "not many years ago".
The swollen waters of the Tigris handily prevented Prester from freeing the Holy Land, so he went home carrying his fabulous emerald sceptre. In 1141, the Qara Khitai khanate under Yelü Dashi defeated the Muslim Seljuk Turks in the Battle of Qatwan, near Samarkand. Since vassals of the Qara Khitai practiced Nestorian Christianity, this may have bolstered the myth and the Europeans could also have thought of any non-Muslim (i.e. Buddhist) as Christian, more fool them. There’s a slim chance Otto recorded the report for the Crusade's European backers, undercutting the expectation of any aid from a powerful Eastern king of a Christian persuasion.
Doctor of Philosophy Bruun posited in 1876 that Prester John might be one of the early Bagrationi kings of Georgia (who themselves may be descendants of Mark Antony*), who underwent a military comeback at the time of the Crusade and challenged Muslim power in the Caucasus. But Georgia was (and is) Orthodox, not Nestorian, and its earlier incarnations as Colchis and Iberia are well-documented and hardly obscure.
Incidentally, the closest thing the English ever came to meeting a Prestor John-type figure was when the late-period Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (1350–1425) spent Christmas as Henry IV’s guest at Eltham palace on the outskirts of London.
An exotic sight for any in the country who hadn’t been on a Crusade.
* Mark Antony
Ethiopia
Since no sign of Prester John was found in Asia, by 1250 AD it was decided that he ruled the ancient Christian kingdom of Ethiopia all along.
Marco Polo called Ethiopia a magnificent Christian land and Orthodox Christians had a legend that the nation would one day rise up and conquer Arabia, but he did not place Prester John there. In 1306, 30 Ethiopian ambassadors from Emperor Wedem Arad came to Europe, and a ‘Prester John’ was said to be the patriarch of their native church in a record of their visit. In the Mirabilia Descripta by Dominican missionary Catalani Jordanus (around 1329) he discusses the "Third India" (Ethiopia), and the king who rules there, who Europeans call ‘Prester John’.
Europe and North-East Africa gradually became better acquainted with each other, as 1428 saw the Kings of Aragon and Ethiopia negotiating the possibility of a strategic, but unlikely marriage, between the royal offspring of the two kingdoms. In 1487, two Portuguese envoys, Pêro da Covilhã and Afonso de Paiva, were sent to gather information on a possible sea route to India and find out about Prester John. Covilhã managed to reach Ethiopia, but was forbidden to depart.
Further envoys were sent in 1507, after the large nearby island of Socotra* (which lies between the Guardafui Channel and the Arabian Sea, and is now part of war torn Yemen) was taken by the Portuguese; regent queen Eleni of Ethiopia sent ambassador Mateus to king Manuel I of Portugal and the pope, in search of a coalition. Priest Francisco Álvares’ book the Verdadeira Informação das Terras do Preste João das Indias ("A True Relation of the Lands of Prester John of the Indies") was the first direct account of Ethiopia and was presented to the pope.
*The island where Sinbad encountered the giant Roc bird:
By 1520, Prester John was the name by which Europeans knew the Emperor of Ethiopia, although the inhabitants never called their emperor by the name - and they should know.
Current historians find nothing about Prester John or his country that makes Ethiopia a more suitable location; it only became widely known as such after the Portuguese reached the country (via the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea). In 1751, Czech Franciscan Remedius Prutky asked Emperor Iyasu II about this and said, "the kings of Abyssinia had never been accustomed to call themselves by this name."
North America?
Italian historian Peter Martyr d'Anghiera identified the land of Prester John with Francisco de Chicora’s native South Carolina in his Decades of the New World. Chicora was captured by the Spanish in 1521 and told his captors his country was ruled by Christian priests.
Prester John lives on as a cultural phenomenon
By the seventeenth century, any serious hunt for the monarch all but ceased, as the world was mapped and evidence sifted. Then Prester John became a cultural phenomenon, rather than a seriously held theory. Shame, in a way, I guess.
In George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman on the March, Sir Harry Flashman (the now-adult bully from Tom Brown's School Days) visits the city of Gondar (‘the Camelot of Africa’) in Abyssinia and pronounces, ‘If Prester John existed, this was where he'd sat his throne’.
Prester’s name has lived on in John Buchan’s 1910 novel Prester John (where a rebel uses the name of Prester John and possession of his sacred ruby neck to lead a rising against colonial rule in S. Africa) as a Marvel and DC Comics character, in two Umberto Eco books (2000’s Baudolino and Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, 1998) for the highbrows amongst you.
In Marvel Comics, Prester John is a near-immortal (via suspended animation in his alchemical Chair of Survival) explorer who once ruled an unnamed land in Eastern Asia, and also at times a priest, and an adventurer. An ally of King Richard Lionheart who served in his court and possessor of the mystic Evil Eye granted to him in the extra-dimensional land of Avalon, which can project terrifying bursts of energy.
So Prester John was the fictional precursor to the ‘Men Who Would Be King’ who actually existed. The likes of James Brooke - ‘The White Rajah’, Tristram Speedy, Josiah Harlan (‘Prince of Ghor’), Cecil Rhodes, Sir Richard Francis Burton and others, such as American adventurer Alexander Gardner (1785- 1877) Commandant of Artillery for Maharaja Ranjit Singh, whose neck wounds obliged him to clamp a pair of forceps to his neck whenever he ate or drank.
And George Thomas (1756-1802), the 'Raja from Tipperary', the Irish mercenary who, from 1798 to 1801, carved out and ruled a kingdom of his own in India, from the Hisar and Rohtak districts of Haryana.
Back in 2004, it was discovered that Josiah Harlan, the hereditary Prince of Ghor, has an heir to the Afghan principality - his great, great, great grandson the actor Scott Reiniger (Dawn of the Dead). Unsurprisingly, Scott has so far passed on the opportunity to take the reins of power in the Taliban-ruled province.
In other words, enterprising folk who set up their own states or become warlords in foreign climes...or attempted to.
And in the film world, movie overlords such as Colonel Kurtz (Apocalypse Now), Marcus Kane (Doomsday), and especially Nick Nolte’s Learoyd in Farewell to the King. In John Milius’ picture, Nolte plays a US army deserter in WWII who becomes king of a remote tribe of Borneo Dayaks, who consider him divine because of his blond locks and ice-blue eyes.
Brooke (Borneo again):
Stephen Arnell’s novel THE GREAT ONE is now available on Amazon Kindle:
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