The myth of Prester John is one of the most recurrent myths in history: a distant and very powerful priest-king capable of awakening the hope of Christendom in its lowest hours
Carlos de Ayala Martínez
Autonomous University of Madrid
Unlike other myths, the myth of Prester John has an almost exact date of appearance. The first direct mention is provided by the Cistercian bishop and chronicler Otto of Freising, grandson of Henry IV and uncle of Frederick Barbarossa. He includes it in his Chronicle or History of the Two Cities, completed in 1145.
At that time, the bishop-chronicler met at the papal court in Viterbo a bishop from the crusader principality of Antioch: Hugh, bishop of Jabala (formerly Byblos). He was there to ask the West for help in the face of the recent fall of Edessa. Well, according to him, not many years ago a certain John, a king and priest, who lived in the far east, beyond Persia and Armenia, and who was a Nestorian Christian, had waged war and defeated the two brother kings who ruled over the Persians and Medes, the so-called Samiards. After the victory it seems that John was willing to lend his assistance to the Church in Jerusalem, but when on his march westwards he reached the Tigris, he found that he had no suitable vessels to cross the river, and marched northward in the hope of passing over it in the area where he had been informed that it froze. He remained there for some years in vain, because the river did not freeze over, and so he decided to return to his base. The Bishop of Jabala’s account concludes by saying that the Prester was a descendant of the Magi from the East to whom the Gospel of Saint Matthew alludes, and that he ruled over the same lands that they had ruled.
The text of Otto of Freising raises three questions: the possible historical foundation on which the narrative is based; the connection of this foundation with a specific character, a Christian named John and heir of the biblical Magi; and the intentionality behind the inclusion of this information in the work of the Germanic chronicler.
On the first of these questions there is little doubt. It is a distorted version of the Battle of Qatwān, near Samarkand, in 1141, in which Sultan Mu’izz al-dīn Sanyar, head of the Great Seljuq Empire, was defeated by Ye Liu Dashi, a proto-Mongol prince of the Kitan ethnic group, who was trying to consolidate a khanate west of the Gobi Desert, that of Qara-Jitai.
It is not necessary to say what a morale-booster this news would have been for the threatened Christians overseas on the eve of the Turkish offensive against Edessa. They thought they could interpret this victory as that of a Christian power against Islam. Such an assumption was logically wrong, but it also had some basis in fact. A significant proportion of the proto-Mongol tribes in the Qara-Jitai Khanate were Buddhist and Christian-Nestorian, and although Ye Liu Dashi was supposed to practise the shamanism of his ancestors, he showed a certain religious ambiguity which resulted in the imposition of a Christian name, Elijah, for his heir.
The second question we asked ourselves was the connection of this historical fact with a specific personage, a Christian named John who was the descendant of the Magi from the East. To begin with, why was it thought in the Crusader principalities that there were Christians in the Far East? The fabled evangelisation of India by the Apostle Thomas was known in the West from ancient times, according to an account dating from the 3rd century. This knowledge was confirmed by two contemporaneous and independent testimonies from the middle of the 12th century which narrate the visit to Pope Callixtus II in 1122 of a mysterious Archbishop John of India who told him that the incorrupt body of St. Thomas presided over the liturgy of his feast each year and received or rejected the offerings made to him by opening or closing his arms. These testimonies also spoke of India as a rich and wonderful country watered by the river Pison, one of the four in the biblical Paradise.
It was this news that probably induced Hugh of Jabala to name the conqueror of the Turks after the archbishop, and to associate his fabulous kingdom with India. On the other hand, the connection of Prester John with the Magi is also easy to establish because it was believed from ancient times in the West that the Magi had lived in India and received baptism from the hands of the Apostle Thomas.
We are left to answer the third question: what was the Germanic bishop’s intention in introducing, and thus encouraging, the Syrian bishop’s account? The bishop’s work in which the account appears was written in the midst of the upheaval of the fall of Edessa, and has a clearly apocalyptic slant: it speaks of the six ages and the four kingdoms of the book of Daniel, and in the last part introduces an essay on the end of the world. The story of Prester John comes just before this essay, and may well be the eschatological appeal to a providential intervention of God in the midst of the catastrophe that Christianity was experiencing.
The portrait of Prester John and the description of his marvelous kingdom were soon completed with a letter supposedly sent by Prester John himself to the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Comnenus inviting him to accept his lordship, a copy of which would have reached Frederick I Barbarossa. The letter was probably written in 1165. It is a widely circulated text with more than 200 manuscripts and many different versions.
What does it add to what we already know? First of all, it attributes to Presbyter John —by the way, no longer a Nestorian— the title of «lord of lords», an expression used in the Bible to designate God or Christ. On the other hand, the frustrated attempt to reach Jerusalem that we saw in the primitive account now becomes a conscious vow to destroy the enemies of the cross of Christ. His dominions are further described as corresponding to the Three Indies, where the body of the apostle Thomas rested, and extending from the tower of Babel in the Babylonian desert to the place where the sun rises. These immense dominions were divided into 72 provinces, each ruled by a king who served as tributary to Prester John, but not all of them were Christians; there were Jews —the kings of the Ten Lost Tribes— and pagans like the king of the Amazons or the king of the Brahmans; and to make matters worse, there were also populations of strange and monstrous humanoids such as fauns, satyrs, dog-headed men, and giants or one-eyed giants.
This heterogeneous world was characterised by the presence of exotic and extremely rich flora and fauna, including griffins and phoenixes, as well as extraordinary material wealth: precious stones in the riverbeds and fine fabrics made from the skins of salamanders. There were also wonderful rivers, in some of which sand flowed instead of water and from which, nevertheless, delicious fish were extracted. Such wealth translated into benefits for the bodily, and —above all— moral, health of the inhabitants.
Bodily health was guaranteed by waters that ensured a physical appearance of no more than 32 years and also by stones that helped to rejuvenate those who used them; moral health, on the other hand, was the effect of a society without poor people in which no one needed to covet what belonged to others.
The letter also provides information about the life of Prester John, a chaste man who saw his beautiful women only four times a year and then only to procreate. There is also information about his enormous army of 13,000 knights and 1,300,000 armed labourers, and about his incredible palace, in which he was served by the highest dignitaries of ecclesiastical status, and in which, thanks to a marvellous gigantic mirror,Prester John controlled everything that happened in his empire.
Today we know who penned this fabulous charter: it emanated from the imperial chancellery of Frederick I, controlled by the Archbishop of Cologne Rainald Dassel, which propagated the programme of the Romano-Germanic Empire. Dassel was responsible for the conversion of Frederick Barbarossa‘s initial German policy into a truly imperial one based on three assumptions: firstly, of harmonious unity within the Empire, a real challenge given the heterogeneity of its complex structure made up of kingdoms, duchies and great ecclesiastical lordships, that were more or less autonomous and very different from one another; secondly, of a recognition by those outside the Empire of its pre-eminence, which validated its hegemonic pretensions; and lastly, of strict subjection of the Church to the authority of the emperor.
If we take a closer look, the letter of Prester John is simply a reflection of this programme in an absolutely idealised and messianic key, a key which, moreover, was by no means alien to the Germanic imperial court in which Frederick came to be identified with «the last emperor», the one who according to an extra-biblical tradition would recover Jerusalem and renounce his crown to make way for the inevitable eschatological figure of the Antichrist.
Without losing sight of this messianic perspective, it is worth returning to the content of Prester John’s letter, which contains five fundamental ideas that are directly connected with the emperor’s programme:
- Unity of government capable of integrating kingdoms, duchies and great ecclesiastical principalities under the authority of a single leader.
- The low clerical status of the ruler did not preclude the subordination to his power of the highest ecclesiastical dignities, even the head of the Church, the patriarch of St Thomas. In this context
,let us not forget the aspiration of Frederick, anointed by God, to preside over Christendom above the authority of the Pope. - Prester John’s power extended to Christians and non-Christians alike, i.e. his leadership was radically universal. In the same way, Frederick I claimed a universal projection of his power that knew no limits.
- Prester John aspired to the conquest of Jerusalem and, with it, the destruction of the enemies of the cross. And certainly for Frederick I the Crusader goal of Jerusalem was an unquestionable priority.
- Such a power conforms to recognised standards of justice, guarantees the welfare of its subjects and avoids wars and division
s; and this is where the letter writer uses the example of Prester John to underline his message.
What does the exuberant and exaggerated imagination exercised in the letter add tothis? It is to be understood as a deployment of messianic language, which would no doubt be relatively easy to grasp at the time. According to such language, God’s anointed or messiah is a king who acquires outstanding power and wisdom and who, in addition, is able to generate prosperity, wealth and health for his subjects.
This messianic role was what Frederick I also claimed for himself. He did not hesitate to present himself as someone closely related to Prester John through none other than the Magi, his predecessors. In 1164, a year before the letter was dated, the imperial chancellor and archbishop of Cologne organised the solemn transfer of the relics of the Magi from Milan, where according to tradition they had been preserved since the 4th century, to Cologne cathedral, where it was intended to erect a shrine of religious reference for the whole of Christian royalty.
The message was clear: to honour the memory of those who had created the messianic kingdom that had existed under the rule of Prester John, a kingdom similar to the Germanic Roman Empire, and the only one capable of guaranteeing peace in Christendom in the face of a Byzantine Empire deprived of its universal power or of a pope who, obstinate in imposing himself on secular power, had provoked a schism within the Church.
We have no record that the Byzantine emperor ever replied to Prester John’s letter, but Pope Alexander III did so. It is obvious that he was able to identify the editor and therefore answered the letter when his arm-wrestling with the emperor was decided in his favour at the peace of Venice in 1177, after which time the emperor stopped supporting anti-popes in exchange for the lifting of his excommunication.
That year, in fact, the pope, playing the emperor’s game, addressed John, as King of the Indies, omitting his priestly status. The letter consisted of a synthesis of the doctrine of apostolic primacy and an invitation to assume Roman orthodoxy because some emissaries had informed him of certain deviations. The pope’s message was clear: he was the undisputed leader of Christianity and the one responsible for correcting the deviations of his faithful, however powerful they might be.
The figure of Prester John disappeared from history until 40 years later when he reappeared on the scene of the Fifth Crusade (1218-1221). Scholars agree that this was one of the moments at which apocalyptic expectations of the crusading movement were at their highest. It had gone from bad to worse since the fall of Jerusalem, and there were more than a few who thought it was now or never. But the Fifth Crusade was also a succession of failures, and in this atmosphere both of pessimism and of the abandonment of messianic hope, two prophetic texts were opportunely «found» in the crusader camp besieging Damietta, which spoke of coming victories over Islam, together with a story entitled History of the Deeds of David, King of the Indies.
The first of the prophetic texts, called the Prophecy of Hannan, son of Isaac, said, among many other things, that a «king of the Nubian Christians» would destroy Mecca and scatter the bones of the Prophet. The second was the Book of Clement, the disciple of St. Peter who conveyed to him, among other revelations of Christ before the Ascension, that Jerusalem would be definitively recovered by the joint action of two kings, one from the West and the other from the East.
The History of David’s Deeds, on the other hand, recounted strictly contemporary events involving King David, a Nestorian Christian who, commanding a mighty army of almost 400,000 horsemen, only a third of them Christian, was expanding his power as far as Baghdad, whose surrender he was about to achieve with the intention of continuing on to Jerusalem, where he intended to restore its walls.
It is not difficult today to identify the historical coordinates of this story, which has a rather meagre basis in fact. King David is none other than Küchlüg, the last Naiman prince, whose Christian nomadic people in western Mongolia were subdued by Genghis Khan in the early 13th century. Although Küchlüg was a Christian, he had converted to Buddhism by the time of his death at the hands of the Mongols in 1218.
It is curious that the author of the History of the Deeds of David, an Eastern Christian, did not know of the death of Küchlüg, his King David, and also that he knew little about the Mongols; in the end he confuses Küchlüg-David with Genghis Khan himself, the one responsible for his death. From 1218 onwards, David’s victories are in reality those of Genghis Khan, who certainly reached the gates of Baghdad.
His identification with Prester John, or with a son of Prester John, does not come from the Eastern Christian author, who was probably unaware of this tradition, but from Damietta’s crusader propagandists. What is certain is that in 1221 Pope Honorius III instructed the archbishops of Christendom —the letter sent to the archbishop of Tarragona survives— to call for a general mobilisation in support of Damietta’s crusade because he had reliable information that King David, commonly known as Prester John, a Catholic and God-fearing man, was less than ten days from Baghdad, ready to come to their aid.
We have reviewed the origins and consolidation of the myth of Prester John. It is easy to deduce why this came about. The three milestones that make up the first and most decisive phase of his legend relate to moments of crisis. It was the year 1145 that Otto of Freising speaks of him for the first time in the midst of the trauma of the fall of Edessa. So too the years between 1165 and 1177, the dates of the «epistolary exchange» of Prester John, were years of schism and the confrontation of two exclusive models of the organisation of Christianity, that of the emperor and that of the pope. Also critical were the years 1220-1221, when Prester John was revived in the form of King David, years in which the effectiveness of the crusade, the system of legitimisation on which Christianity had been based for centuries, was definitively put to the test.
In all three critical moments, recourse to the imagination was necessary to put new heart into demoralised crusaders or Christian leaders in distress. In all three circumstances, the myth served as a form of sacralised propaganda capable of arousing feelings of belief and utopian enthusiasm. That and no other is the reason for the myth of Prester John, at least in his early days, before knowledge of the realAsia confined him to unknown black Africa, from the 14th century onwards.
But it is a myth —let us not forget— in which everyone, in one way or another, believed: rulers as a living instrument capable of instilling hope, their audience as an expression of belief in the possibility of a better future; for everyone he marked those imprecise frontiers between history and meta-history that messianism generates.
Further reading:
- AYALA MARTÍNEZ, C. de (2018): «El Preste Juan: el ‘Otro’ cristiano en la frontera del mito (Siglos XII-XIII)», Intus-Legere. Historia, 12, pp. 155-186.
- BREWER, Keagan (2015): Prester John: The Legend and its Sources, Ashgate.
- GUMILEV, Lev N. (1994): The search for an imaginary kingdom. La leyenda del Preste Juan, Barcelona: Crítica (orig. Russian 1970).
- HAMILTON, Bernard, eds. (1996): Prester John, the Mongols and the Ten Lost Tribes, Variorum.
- LAMB, Alastair, «The Search of Prester John», History Today, 20 Feb 2018, https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/search-prester-john.