APPENDIX the History of the Legend of Prester John1 Is Interconnected

APPENDIX A BRIEF HisTORY oF PRESTER JoHN The history of the legend of Prester John1 is interconnected with the history of England's, and Europe's, fascination with Africa. To under stand this fully, we must understand the immediate historical context into which the letters ofPrester John were introduced, and the ideo logical work they performed. The Saracens began seriously to threaten the crusading Christian West in the 1130s under the general ship of the Turk Imad ad-din Zengi. Zengi managed to secure most of Syria before laying siege to Edessa2 late in 1144. Edessa had been ruled by the family of the famous Crusader Baldwin of Lorraine since 1098, but on Christmas Eve ofl144 the Turks broke through the walls and took the city, slaughtering thousands. The fall ofEdessa was a trau matic event for the Christian West, for "never before had the Saracens succeeded in ousting the Crusaders from a major city" (Silverberg 5). Then, sometime between 1144 and 1180, a mysterious letter appeared addressed to the Emperor Manuel Comnenus, sent by one Prester John. The letter had an immediate and profound impact on Europe. Prester John claimed to be a great king, ruler of the Three Indias and, more importantly, a Christian. In his letter Prester John tells of a great battle he has recently won against the Saracens, and then goes on to describe his kingdom. He chronicles the great wealth of the Indias, and promotes his realm as a Christian kingdom whose inhabitants live with no strife, in perfect fellowship. Even more impor tantly, the letter offered the possibility of aid against the Saracens. As Bernard Hamilton puts it, "Prester John symbolized the hopes which western Christians in the twelfth century derived from the certain knowledge that there were in the lands beyond Islam Christian com munities who might potentially be useful allies, and those hopes were focused on the region where allies were most needed, the lands to the east" ( 1996 238). Michael Uebel posits that the Letter works both to compensate for what is lost, namely, the Holy Land and its treasures, and to safeguard what is already possessed. The 164 ~ APPENDIX classical and medieval encyclopedia, genres to which we might compare the Letter in terms of ideological utility, compile facta as a response to the urgency of cultural disruptions ... [M]edieval encyclopedic narratives, like the Letter, taxonomize the world, provisionally sheltering it against ever-present threats of disorder and oblivion. (262 )3 Thus the letter ofPrester John performed three important functions: it gave the crusading Christians a ray of hope in their fight against the Saracens; it allowed a sort of order to be imposed upon the perceived chaos of the Saracens and their threats of destroying the Christian nations; and at the same time it drew its audience's imaginations to the lands just beyond the Holy Land in its descriptions of a vast and unimaginably wealthy Christian utopia. So important was the idea of Prester John to the Crusader imagination that the veracity of his let ter was, for the most part, never doubted.4 Embassies from every European country tried to find him, scouring the lands just beyond the Saracens'. Even Pope Alexander II sent him a letter expressing a wish to form a close alliance. But by the later thirteenth century the quest for Prester John had become much less urgent. Hamilton notes that in the late thirteenth century there seemed no need for Prester John any more. The Great Khans of the Mongols were not Christian, but they extended complete tolerance to Christians, while many of their leaders had Ncstorian wives or mothers ... There seemed a real possibility that parts of the Mongol empire might be converted to the Catholic faith, and, moreover, it was also possible for Western missionaries to travel freely from Mongol territory to the lands of southern Asia and to work there. In these circumstances, when Islam appeared weak, the West did not feel in need of reassurance and no attempt was made to revive a belief in Prester John. (1996 250) In 1291, though, the last major Crusader outpost at Acre fell, followed in quick succession by several other crucial outposts. Then, in 1295, the new Khan embraced Islam, and all hopes tor a Christian-Mongol alliance faded. It was in this historical context that the search for Prester John revived. Now, though, a distinct shift came about in the location ofPrester John's lands. The Christian West had, by this time, ventured quite far into Saracen territory and beyond; Asia had been explored and made more familiar, and still there was no sign of the legendary Prester John. Perhaps naturally, then, the search turned south toward Mrica. This movement in the European imaginary ofPrcster John's lands from Asia to Mrica was aided by two important events. In 1306 an APPENDIX ~ 165 embassy of thirty Ethiopians, on their way home from negotiating an alliance with the king of Spain, were delayed in Genoa, during which time they were interviewed by the geographer Giovanni da Carignano, who compiled from their responses a treatise on the government and other social aspects ofEthiopia.5 Included in this treatise was a map, upon which he indicates that Prester John is the ruler of the Ethiopians, thus making him the first verifiable writer to locate Prester John in Africa and not in Asia although, as Charles Beckingham notes, "it has been alleged that a merchant who was among the informants ofJacques de Vitry had done so about a hundred years before" (1989 339).6 Giovanni da Carignano's map does not survive. The second event was the publication of the Mirabilia Descripta by the Dominican missionary Jordanus of Severac. Jordanus set out to sea some time around the year 1320 to join a foreign archdiocese, but was blown off course and spent several years in Mrica; the Mirabilia Descripta, writ ten between 1330 and 1340, describes his travels through Asia and Africa; in this text he too claims that Prester John is in Mrica, and is in fact the emperor of the Ethiopians. Francese Relano has observed that "the most interesting thing to note is that the tone used by Friar Jordanus in his work is not the one generally employed to announce a sudden novelty. On the contrary, it seems as if he was just echoing a current opinion of his times" (54). At first, these scholars' location of Prester John in Mrica did not reflect the most common opinions of their time, but by the middle of the fourteenth century, as Relano demonstrates, "the above-mentioned isolated opinions soon became a generalized conviction through the work of contemporary cartogra phers. Giovanni de Carignano might well be placed at the origin of the protracted process by which Prester John became an Mrican emperor in Ethiopia" (55). With the growth of these isolated opinions into what Relano calls a "generalized conviction," the search for Prester John was revived, and its focus shifted to Mrica, as attested to by the vast numbers of European voyages to the west coast of Mrica that quickly followed, led chiefly by the Portuguese. The earliest surviving map to ascribe Prester John's kingdom to Mrica is that of Angelino Dulcert in 1339, who it is theorized had access to Carignano's work.7 From this point on, Prester John is almost invariably located in Mrica. 8 Phillips notes that "the last actual European traveler to locate Prester John in Asia was Odoric ofPordenone in the 1320s, whose travel narrative was to be one of the sources used by the compiler of Mandeville" (144). After that, as Uebel notes, the "quest for Prester John in Mrica recurs constantly in the history of European exploration. Mter Dominicans 166 • APPENDIX are sent to Abyssinia in 1316 by Pope John XXII, stories return from that region about Prester John and his magnificent empire. A story of the king is told in 1391 to King John I of Aragon by a priest who had spent several years at his court" (271). The shift to Africa was not, though, only a geographical necessity brought about by the failure to locate Prester John in Asia. It was also an ideological and military necessity; as Hamilton describes it, "as the focus of Muslim power in the near east shifted from Iraq to Egypt, so too did the Priest King's [Prester John's] centre of power shift from Asia to Mrica" (1996 237).9 Relano has also ascribed this movement to "the political and commercial atmosphere" of the time, which, as a result ofbetter rela tions with the Saracens, meant that merchants often traded along the Mrican coast. 10 Based on a consideration of these factors, then, it makes sense that Prester John's location shifted to Mrica. His existence there offered the possibilities of military aid, territorial conquest, and commercial success. In his original location in Asia he served as a potential ally against the Saracens. In Mrica he likewise represented a powerful and Christian ally in the region. It will be clear by now that the shifting ofPrester John's perceived location to Mrica, rather than Asia, coincides with the sudden flurry of production, in Middle English, of literature dealing with Mricans. Approximately fifteen years after Jordanus of Severac's Mirabilia was published, the earliest versions of The Book ofJohn Mandeville appear on the literary scene. Approximately thirty-five years later, John Trevisa begins work on his translation of the De Proprietatibus Rerum, at roughly the same time that the first English translations of the Three Kings of Cologne and the Secretum Secretorum begin to appear.

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