The Lasting Lure of Prester John’s Promised Land

The myth of Prester John, a Christian patriarch and king who supposedly led a vast and wealthy kingdom, has fascinated explorers, historians, and dreamers for centuries. This legendary figure, with his kingdom full of untold riches and wonders unknown to the outside world, represents a beacon of hope and curiosity in the medieval imagination.

The search for Prester John’s kingdom led to various expeditions, intertwining the myth with medieval exploration and cultural exchange. Even today, the legend of Prester John’s promised land continues to inspire tales of adventure and the timeless human longing for discovery.

Origins of the Prester John Myth

The story of the rich and powerful Christian king named Prester John, who ruled over a perfect land inhabited by people with inexhaustible wealth and goods and surrounded by exotic marvels, has captured the European imagination for a long time, since at least the Middle Ages. The origins of the myth are unclear, but its first appearance in the West is in a letter allegedly sent by this king in 1165 to the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Komnenos.

The anonymous letter from “John, Christian Sovereign and Lord of Lords” describes the ruler’s splendid Central Asian kingdom: “We rule a palace in glittering gems and gold from Persia to China,” it proclaims. A land where “all that is desired here is met with and where abundance never ends,” and, last but not least, a Christian land filled with untold wealth, made Prester John a dream of many.

The legend of Prester John has many origins, including other accounts of the East and of Western people’s travels to it. Among them was the story of evangelism in India by Saint Thomas the Apostle, especially in the “Acts of Thomas”, a hagiographic work from the third century. This apocryphal account describes India as a land of exotic wonders and thus developed a tradition that Christians were established in that country. This supported the idea that India might be the location of Prester John’s kingdom.

The significant presence of the Church of the East and its missionary activity among the Mongols and Turks of Central Asia was also a potential source of a Christian land of this mystical rule. The Church of the East had a relation with the Kerait clan: the Kerait king and many of his subjects converted to Christianity around 1000 AD. At that time, they adopted Christian names.

The story may also be influenced by John the Presbyter of Syria, a Christian mentioned by Eusebius of Caesarea. The only connection to the Prester John legend is a shared name, but the early presbyter (the title “Prester” is derived from the Greek presbyteros, meaning “elder”) was significant enough to inspire the later legend.

Prester John and the Mongol Connection

As it turned out, Prester John’s next great champion was none other than the Mongol Empire, which was beginning to rise in the early thirteenth century. Upon his return from the Fifth Crusade, the Bishop of Acre, Jacques de Vitry, excitedly reported the news that King David of India, a supposed descendant of Prester John, was waging war on the Saracens and subduing their forces. The story gained wide circulation, and this king, after conquering Persia and moving towards Baghdad, was greeted as the saviour who would deliver and purify Jerusalem once again. However, the “King David” in question was in reality Genghis Khan, the Mongol ruler.

As the Mongols expanded their territory, more and more Western travellers began to explore the East. Some were envoys sent by European monarchs, others were missionaries of various orders, while some were simply adventurers. Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and William of Rubruck were among the most well-known of them, but they were by no means the only ones.

At any given time, there were numerous Christians travelling along the safe roads that the Mongols provided through their empire, all in the hope of finding either this lost kingdom or of reaching an alliance with a Christian or non-Christian ruler who would help the Crusader states survive. Along with their accounts, this increasingly frequent contact between East and West led to Prester John being firmly equated with the Mongols. One of the early Mongol leaders to become involved with Prester John was Genghis Khan’s foster father, Toghrul, the king of the Keraites. Toghrul’s family was a Christian line, and he was Prester John.

Prester John was imagined in different forms because these new travellers through the Mongol lands began to find Christians everywhere in the East. Later sources that mentioned Prester John began to portray him increasingly as an ordinary mortal king, involved in terrestrial wars. The legendary war fought between Prester John and Genghis Khan ended in Prester John’s defeat. The Prester John myth was greatly humanized, and to an extent, demythologised.

With the decline of the Mongol Empire and as their Christian subjects were pushed to the peripheries of their territories, belief in the Central Asian presence of this fabled kingdom lessened. The location of his land moved further eastward, with more fantastic elements attached to it, until it became so great that its actual location was finally considered unknown.

From Asian Myth to Ethiopian Reality

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the legend was transferred from the mysterious interior of Asia to the more familiar, though still exotic, Africa, specifically Ethiopia. There had always been a close identification between Ethiopia and its Christian kingdom and the legend of Prester John. Medieval Europeans’ understanding of geography was vague, “India” being applied in an elastic way to include Ethiopia. In addition, Ethiopia was known to be a Christian kingdom, though it had only been in intermittent contact with Europeans.

For these reasons, it was natural that Prester John should be identified with Ethiopia. This was also likely due to the changing geography of Europe, with the idea that a Christian force was needed in Arabia and the Ottoman Empire; Europeans were beginning to move to Asia in larger numbers than ever before. The “transposition” of the legend’s focus, which hinted at an Ethiopian link to the fictional kingdom, may be dated to approximately 1250, even though Prester John had previously been associated with an Asian setting.

Though Marco Polo described Ethiopia as a powerful Christian empire, and Orthodox Christians expected an Ethiopian attack on Arabia, this did not immediately lead to an apparent association of the legendary ruler with Ethiopia. In 1306, however, the Ethiopian embassy to Europe of Emperor Wedem Arad recognized Prester John as their father, and by 1329, the Dominican missionary Jordanus described in his travel account an African Prester John, with the kingdom more exotically described and located in the “Third India.”

The African geographical focus of the Prester John legend was further strengthened by increased European contact with Africa, particularly the negotiations begun in 1428 between the Kings of Aragon and Ethiopia. This search for Prester John was the leading European motive behind Pêro da Covilhã’s explorations in 1487. Da Covilhã was instructed to find Prester John as well as a sea route to India. Though unsuccessful in his primary purpose, his travels in Africa led to a connection between Ethiopia and Portugal. The final contact between the two countries was the ambassador Mateus, a mission sent from Ethiopia to Portugal in 1507, and the European discovery of Ethiopia, its Christian king, and the association with Prester John followed.

In 1520, diplomatic relations between the Emperor of Ethiopia, Lebna Dengel, and Portugal were firmly established. At this point, the monarch of Ethiopia had been given the label Prester John by Europe. This was a title that the Ethiopians would not have been aware of. The name was not in use in Ethiopian regnal lists or nomenclature, and it was unknown to the general population until European ships began arriving on the coast of Ethiopia. The Ethiopian monarchs did not know of their new role in this legend until the improved European navigation made it known. The transposition of the legend to Ethiopia was not unlike the earlier transposition to the Central Asian world.

Fading Legend, Enduring Influence

By the 1600s, explorers like the German orientalist Hiob Ludolf had proven beyond doubt that Prester John was not in any way linked to the kings of Ethiopia, and an active search for Prester John ground to a halt. However, by that point, the Prester John myth had already made an indelible mark on history, inspiring centuries of European exploration, scholarship, and treasure-hunting. For better or worse, the quest for Prester John had encouraged an explosion in exploratory and missionary activity, both directly and indirectly, the effects of which would help to shape the course of global history for centuries to come.

This myth would continue to inspire fiction and artwork in the modern period, even as any serious quest for the figure came to an end. For example, Shakespeare mentions Prester John in Much Ado About Nothing, and John Buchan’s 1910 novel The Enigmatic Ruler revolves around a Zulu uprising in South Africa. Buchan’s book has been called a fine example of the classic 20th-century adventure novel. Prester John has been used as a name for many characters in pulp magazines, comics, and books in the 20th century. Marvel Comics had its own Prester John, whose main character is the Marvel family, the Royal Order of Forsytes.

DC Comics also features a Prester John in the form of a Marvel superhero, who is also an African king. Charles Williams would also use the Prester John myth as the subject of his own work, while Umberto Eco would draw on it in his novel Baudolino.