The legends of
Prester John (also
Presbyter John), popular in
Europe from the 12th through the 17th centuries, told of a
Christian patriarch and
king said to rule over a Christian nation lost amidst the
Muslims and
pagans in the
Orient. Written accounts of this kingdom are variegated collections of medieval popular fantasy. Reportedly a descendant of one of the
Three Magi, Prester John was said to be a generous ruler and a virtuous man, presiding over a realm full of riches and strange creatures, in which the Patriarch of the
Saint Thomas Christians resided. His kingdom contained such marvels as the
Gates of Alexander and the
Fountain of Youth, and even bordered the
Earthly Paradise. Among his treasures was a mirror through which every province could be seen, the fabled original from which derived the "
speculum literature" of the late
Middle Ages and
Renaissance, in which the prince's realms were surveyed and his duties laid out.
[1]At first, Prester John was imagined to be in India; tales of the "Nestorian" Christians' evangelistic success there and of Thomas the Apostle's subcontinental travels as documented in works like the Acts of Thomas probably provided the first seeds of the legend. After the coming of the Mongols to the Western world, accounts placed the king in Central Asia, and eventually Portuguese explorers convinced themselves they had found him in Ethiopia. Prester John's kingdom was thus the object of a quest, firing the imaginations of generations of adventurers, but remaining out of reach. He was a symbol to European Christians of the Church's universality, transcending culture and geography to encompass all humanity, in a time when ethnic and interreligious tension made such a vision seem distant.
The stories of Saint Thomas proselytizing in India, which date back to at least the 3rd century, had obvious influence on the legend's development. Distorted reports of the Assyrian Church of the East's movements in Asia had a hand as well. This church, called "Nestorian" by Europeans who mistook it as adhering to the teachings of Nestorius, gained a wide following in the Eastern nations and engaged the Western imagination as an assemblage both exotic and familiarly Christian.[2] Additionally, a kernel of the tradition may have been drawn from Saint Irenaeus's quotes, recorded by the ecclesiastical historian and bishop Eusebius of Caesarea,[3] on the shadowy early Christian figure John the Presbyter of Syria, supposed in one document to be the author of two of the Epistles of John.[4] The martyr bishop Papias had been Irenaeus' teacher; Papias in turn had received his apostolic tradition from John the Presbyter. Little links this figure to the Prester John legend beyond the name, however.[5]
Whatever its influences, the legend began in earnest in the early 12th century with two reports of visits of an Archbishop of India to Constantinople and of a Patriarch of India to Rome at the time of Pope Callixtus II (1119 – 1124).[6] These visits apparently from the Saint Thomas Christians of India cannot be confirmed, evidence of both being secondhand reports. Later, the German chronicler Otto of Freising reports in his Chronicon of 1145 that the previous year he had met a certain Hugh, bishop of Jabala in Syria, at the court of Pope Eugene III in Viterbo.[7][8] Hugh was an emissary of Prince Raymond of Antioch seeking Western aid against the Saracens after the Siege of Edessa, and his counsel incited Eugene to call for the Second Crusade. He told Otto, in the presence of the pope, that Prester John, a Nestorian Christian who served in the dual position of priest and king, had regained the city of Ecbatana from the brother monarchs of Medes and Persia, the Samiardi, in a great battle "not many years ago." Afterwards Prester John allegedly set out for Jerusalem to rescue the Holy Land, but the swollen waters of the Tigris compelled him to return to his own country. His fabulous wealth was demonstrated by his emerald scepter; his holiness by his descent from the Three Magi.
