1. So who was Prester John? Why is he important?
Prester John (from the Latin for priest, presbyter) was the name of a mythical ruler of a great Christian empire in India or Central Asia that many medieval Europeans believed existed based on a forged letter that began circulating in Western Europe in the later twelfth century. This letter appeared to be from Prester John himself, who claims to be ruler of the “Three Indias” (a region comprising the Horn of Africa, Arabia, and South Asia in the ancient/medieval geographical imagination) and was addressed to the emperor of Byzantium at the time, Manuel I Komnenos. It pretends to be a somewhat awkward Latin translation of a diplomatic missive that had originally been delivered in Greek, or possibly Persian, to the court of Constantinople. Whoever wrote it tried to weave some Greek-sounding terms into it, but I’m pretty sure it was originally conceived in Latin. It consisted mainly of a series of boastful descriptions of John’s status and wealth and the many wonders and marvels of his kingdom, from strange animals and plants to rivers of gemstones and gold and gem-studded palaces where his court hosts thousands of his subjects. Perhaps just as significant as the vivid descriptions of all these marvels, however, is John’s assertion that he is an orthodox Christian and at one point in the letter, he states that he wishes to come and aid the Christians in the Holy Land in their struggle against the Muslims. This was incredible news to many medieval readers of this letter and no doubt contributed to the intense interest it received, judging by the numerous copies and translations people made of it. Over time, as I discuss in the book, and as other scholars have shown as well, Prester John came to be reimagined as the Christian emperor of Ethiopia, but contacting him or his descendants remained a powerful impetus for European exploration and imperialism in Asia and the New World well into the early modern period. During the Fifth Crusade, a letter thought to be from one of John’s descendants, a ruler named David, actually influenced the Christians’ strategic planning. So the Prester John, or at least the idea of a Prester John, did have a tangible historical impact on the Middle Ages. I suggest the story of Prester John’s empire served as a kind of barometer or reflection of Christian Europe’s perception of itself, particularly in relation to Islamic (or Mongol or Ethiopian) power, but also in relation to history itself.
I suggest the story of Prester John’s empire served as a kind of barometer or reflection of Christian Europe’s perception of itself, particularly in relation to Islamic (or Mongol or Ethiopian) power, but also in relation to history itself.
2. How did you come across this topic?
A lot has been written on Prester John over the decades, so it’s hardly an unknown subject. It was really my work on a small text relating to the history of the Apostle Thomas in India that was part of an article I published in 2016 in Traditio that really got me interested in doing a deeper dive into this legend and what Latin Christians thought they knew about Asian Christianities. I had also read Umberto Eco’s Baudolino at one point and was fascinated by how he used the forging of the Letter of Prester John as a way to cleverly explore the boundaries between literature, history, and truth — the idea that medieval forgeries sort of created their own realities. As I started looking into it, it became clear that while on one level, it was part of a larger European preoccupation with the wealth and marvels of the East, but, more importantly, on the other, there was this idea implicit in the legend that there were these uncontacted Christian lands and peoples out in the far reaches of the known world, particularly Asia, who represented a lost age of Christian domination and sovereignty, before the rise of great powers like the Islamic caliphate or the Mongol empire challenged notions of Christianity’s global “inevitability”, as it were. As I continued my research, I discovered the incredible study by Bettina Wagner on the vast manuscript transmission of the Letter of Prester John and realized that the implications of her work had not really been taken into consideration in the contemporary literary and historical studies of the Letter or legend. So I decided to, in a sense, bring the results of Wagner’s research about the manuscript contexts of the Letter of Prester John to bear on some of the new insights from scholars like Geraldine Heng about the ideological and theological implications of the legend.
…there was this idea implicit in the legend that there were these uncontacted Christian lands and peoples out in the far reaches of the known world, particularly Asia, who represented a lost age of Christian domination and sovereignty…
3. What new insights on the Prester John legend do you have?
I think what everyone wants to know is whether we can identify the person or persons who created this remarkable forgery. Who “invented” Prester John? The short answer is, I have sort of narrowed it down, I think, but there’s no smoking quill right now. The current thinking on the Letter in particular — and this is essentially the point of departure for Eco in Baudolino as well — is that it was a satire of sorts directed against Pope Alexander III by allies of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa during the so-called Alexandrine Schism in the 1160s and 70’s. The idea is that the main characteristic of Prester John is that he is both a king and a priest and all the other major Christian prelates of his realm are subject to him, obviating the need for a pope. Thus it represents a Staufer vision of Christian order with a monarchical sovereign at its head and no pesky pope challenging his authority. I go in a bit of a different direction, guided not so much by the internal details of the text itself, but by its manuscript transmission. What did people who copied it across Western Europe think it related to? What books and works did they file it with when they got a copy? The answer is: not really anything explicitly related to the Alexandrine Schism or popes or Frederick Barbarossa. We see it stuck in with geographical treatises, histories of Rome, Charlemagne, apocalyptic prophecies, Crusade chronicles, and the like. Much of the interest in Prester John appears to have been driven by apocalyptic theology and ideas about the Crusades, the culmination of history, and Christianity’s conflict with Islam. As for where this thing originated, one of the things I do is show how it’s really a composite text that was woven together out of several pre-existing traditions about this priest-king John, the emperor Manuel, and Christian lands in Asia. The Letter as we have it in the later twelfth century is not the earliest textual witness to Prester John. Second, I think the evidence points to a monastery in southern Germany as the point of origin for the Letter, from which point it travelled along well-known travel and trade routes into France and Britain in particular as monks traveling back and forth shared it with their colleagues. Moreover, I think tracing how medieval readers responded to the Prester John legend teaches us a great deal about how knowledge was generated and used at the time. Some people were no doubt skeptical about the whole story, but a lot of people also seemed to have been willing to entertain the possibility that it was true and read it alongside various other repositories of knowledge about the margins of the known world. Overall, there seems to have been this fascinating dialectic or tension between the story’s fantasy and the possibilities of its existence that has a lot to teach us about how medievals understood the world in terms of both realities and unrealities that pointed towards a larger truth — essentially what Eco was getting at in Baudolino as well.
The Letter as we have it in the later twelfth century is not the earliest textual witness to Prester John.
4. Is there more out there to discover about the Prester?
Well, hopefully someday we come across a piece of evidence that allows us to pinpoint, if not the author, then at least the institution where the Letter was forged. I suspect it was probably the Bavarian Benedictine abbey of Tegernsee, which had a famous scriptorium and well-stocked library with works that could have provided some of the material for the Letter. As a historian, I’m aware, as the great Marc Bloch observed, that we shouldn’t get obsessed with origins. But the way that Prester John became, ultimately, an ongoing response of sorts to the dynamics of the Crusades, particularly after the disastrous Second Crusade, and the West’s relationship with Byzantium and the Muslim powers in the Near East really fascinates me, as does understanding what event or events may have triggered the impulse to construct a remote Christian potentate in Asia as a response. Scholars like Matteo Salvadore, Adam Knobler, and the late Bernard Hamilton, have done really interesting work on the shift of the Prester John legend to Africa and its implications for European exploration and colonialism, but I think there’s still more to say about how this figures into preconceptions about power and race on the African continent, particularly as the Atlantic slave trade begins to build from the fifteenth century onwards. There are really interesting representations, for example, of Prester John as a Black African ruler, but also ones that seem to portray him as a white, Christian monarch, albeit ruling Black subjects. That’s worth digging into more, I think.
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