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The message came from a land just beyond what was known, a mighty kingdom in the far east. Or maybe the south. That didn’t matter much; what did matter was that it said all the right things.
The letter, which circulated around Europe in the 12th century, was written to “Emmanuel, governor of the Romans.” Presumably, the intended recipient was Manuel, the Byzantine emperor.
The writer knew what he was doing here. Calling Manuel a mere “governor” was a nice touch; it would have made Western European Christians, whose church had broken with Eastern Orthodoxy, feel good about themselves. Later on, the author snootily calls Manuel’s subjects the Graeculi, or the “little Greeks.”
But it was the author, not the recipient, of the letter that captivated people. The document was a message from a mighty king named John who ruled a powerful kingdom just beyond the horizon of Western European knowledge.
John writes that
If you truly wish to know the magnitude and excellence of our Highness and over what lands our power dominates, then know and believe without hesitation that I, Prester John, am lord of lords and surpass, in all riches which are under the heaven, in virtue and in power, all the kings of the wide world. Seventy-two kings are tributaries to us.
But, even better, John shared the most important characteristic with the Europeans who read his letter: “I am a devout Christian, and everywhere do we defend poor Christians, whom the empire of our clemency rules, and we sustain them with alms.”
John’s kingdom was the stuff of legend, literally:
In our country are born and raised elephants, dromedaries, camels, hippopotami, crocodiles, panthers, aurochs, white and red lions, white bears, white merlins, silent cicadas, griffins, tigers, lamias, hyenas, wild oxen, archers, wild men, horned men, fauns, satyrs and women of the same kind, pigmies, dog-headed men, giants whose height is forty cubits, one-eyed men, Cyclopes, and a bird, which is called the phoenix, and almost all kinds of animals that are under heaven.
He ruled over a land that “flows with honey and abounds with milk.” It was full of emeralds, sapphires, and exotic spices. His kingdom encompassed the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, and Mt. Olympus. His palace was astounding in both its size and opulence. He even had some awesome salamanders that were “only able to live in fire” and produced silk.
John signs off with a message meant to awe and intimidate:
We cannot at present tell you enough about our glory and power. But when you come to us, you will say, that we are truly the lord of lords of the whole earth. In the meantime you should know this trifling fact, that our country extends in breadth for four months in one direction, indeed in the other direction no one knows how far our kingdom extends.
If you can count the stars in heaven and the sand of the sea, then you can calculate the extent of our kingdom and our power.
None of the letter’s claims were true. There was no mighty Christian kingdom out there beyond the edges of the map. No dog-headed men or fire salamanders, either. There was no Christian King named John living in India, Central Asia, or Africa. But that didn’t stop people from believing that he was out there somewhere.
This mythical king became known as Prester John (“Prester” refers to his supposed standing as a priest, or presbyter). His supposed letter circulated for centuries; here’s a page from a Danish version published in 1510:
For almost 500 years, European Christians imagined him out there, somewhere. Immense sums and many lives were spent trying to find him. Though John’s mythical Christian kingdom didn’t exist, those who sought him changed the history of the world.
Why were European Christians so desperate to believe the clearly fraudulent letter that made the rounds in the 1100s? In many ways, their belief functioned in the same way that some conspiracy theories do today — it gave a group of people who felt like they were losing something to believe in, an exotic and powerful savior who would set things right.
Western European Christians weren’t in a great place in the 1100s. The Byzantine Empire had officially rebuffed the authority of the popes in 1054, splitting the Christian world in two. The Crusades, which had begun with great enthusiasm, mostly fizzled out in failure. The crusaders’ enemies, the Muslim kingdoms in the Middle East, proved to be far richer and more scientifically advanced than Christendom.
It was all rather disappointing. If God was on Western Europeans’ side, it wasn’t clear how he was helping. But what if there were a mysterious king out there somewhere who might come to Christendom’s rescue?
Nobody knows who initially forged the Prester John letter, but it captured something in people’s imagination. He had reached out, so Western Europeans should make contact, right?
At first, people guessed that Prester John was in India. This made some sense — Christians had long believed that Thomas, one of Jesus’ apostles, had traveled to India and spread Christianity there. Medieval Europeans didn’t know much about India other than that it was rich and far away. Perhaps there was a mighty Christian king there?
Pope Alexander III sent his own doctor to find John’s kingdom. Nobody knows where this doctor went or if he ever returned. Over the years, John’s location bounced around the map of Asia, flickering at the edges of the lands that Europeans knew about.
The failure to find John didn’t stop people from imagining him; twelfth-century chronicles put Prester John in King Arthur’s family tree. In the early 1200s, desperate crusaders thought that John’s great-grandson, a powerful general who had defeated many Muslim armies, was coming to save them (here, they may have combined rumors about Genghis Khan with their hope for a Christian savior).
Once Europeans got a better understanding of who the Mongols were (they turned out to be very much not Christian!), they decided that Prester John would fight the Khans. John of Plano Carpini’s history of the Mongols imagined the battle:
Chingis [Genghis Khan] sent another son with an army to attack the Indians, and he conquered Lesser India. These black people are Saracens, and are called Ethiopians. This army advanced to make war on the Christians in Greater India. Hearing this, the king of that country, commonly called Prester John, assembled an army and went to meet them; and he made figures of men out of copper and set them in saddles on horses, putting fire inside them, and he placed men with bellows on the horses behind the copper figures, and with many such figures and horses fitted up like this they advanced to fight the Tartars.
Some manuscripts pictured the conflict:
Despite these stories, the Mongols made the Prester John myth more difficult to believe. Travelers like Marco Polo reported back about the immensity and power of the Khans’ domain, so the Prester John myth had to be shaped to fit what was known about the world. During the Mongol centuries, Prester John was seen as less powerful — sometimes a vassal of the Mongols — but he never went away.
As Europeans’ geographical knowledge grew, they began to once again place John on maps of India. Here’s an example from the 1500s showing “Prester John of the Indies:”
This Portuguese picture, too, imagines him in the Indies:
He even got a coat of arms:
Some of the Portuguese sailors who had rounded India in the late 1400s expected to find Prester John’s kingdom and happily mistook Hinduism for Christianity for a while. But, as Europeans learned more about the subcontinent, it became harder to imagine a mighty Christian empire in India.
So they moved Prester John to Ethiopia. Here, too, there was a shred of truth to the idea. Ethiopia had long been a Christian land (it had, in fact, converted to Christianity before much of Europe had).
After an Ethiopian embassy made its way to Rome in 1306, some Europeans relocated Prester John’s kingdom to Africa. Another letter circulated in Europe around this time, supposedly from John to Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. Portuguese kings sent several embassies to Ethiopia in the late 1400s and early 1500s; some insisted on calling the emperors they met there Prester John.
A Catalan map dating to 1450 put Prester John between the two branches of the Nile:
He also appeared on Portuguese maps of Africa:
Some maps even gave his kingdom tidy borders:
Prester John appeared on maps for a long time. Here, he’s depicted on a map printed in 1707:
Prester John conducts an audience in the lower left-hand corner, accompanied by a unicorn:
Eventually, Europeans learned enough about the world to understand that Prester John was nowhere to be found. By this point, they didn’t need the myth anymore — European Christians were far richer and more powerful than they had been in the 1100s. The idea of a powerful Christian monarch at the edge of the map didn’t appeal as much once Europe’s own monarchs had extended their empires around the globe.
So Prester John slowly faded away. But he remains one of the most influential humans who never existed. His kingdom — always out there, somewhere — had an allure that kept drawing Europeans outward. It’s hard to quantify exactly how much, but a lot of European explorers were driven at least in part by a desire to see these lands. They never found a powerful Christian kingdom. But in a way, the myth of Prester John established Christian kingdoms in the faraway places that medieval Christians had mythologized.
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