Prester John

The legend of Prester John (also Presbyter John), popular in Europe from the 12th through the 17th centuries, told of a mythical Christian patriarch and king said to rule over a Christian nation lost amidst the Muslims and pagans in the Orient. Reportedly a descendant of one of the Three Magi, Prester John was said to be a generous ruler and a virtuous man, with a realm full of riches and strange creatures, in which the Patriarch of St. Thomas resided. His kingdom was first imagined to be India, but later accounts shifted it to Central Asia and Ethiopia.

Prester John and Ethiopia

Though Prester John had been considered the ruler of India since the legend's beginnings, "India" was a vague concept to the Europeans. Writers often spoke of the "Three Indias", and lacking any real knowledge of the Indian Ocean, they sometimes considered Ethiopia one of the three. Westerners knew Ethiopia was a mighty Christian nation, but contact had been sporadic since the rise of Islam. But since no Prester John was to be found in Asia, European imagination moved him around the blurry frontiers of "India" until they found an appropriately powerful kingdom for him in Ethiopia.

Related Topics:
Indian Ocean - Ethiopia

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Marco Polo had discussed Ethiopia as a magnificent Christian land and Orthodox Christians had a legend that Ethiopia would one day rise up and invade Arabia, but they didn't place Prester John there. Then in 1306 thirty Ethiopian ambassadors came to Europe, and Prester John was mentioned as the patriarch of their church in a record of their visit.

Related Topics:
Orthodox Christian - Arabia - 1306

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The first clear description of an African Prester John is in the Mirabilia Descripta of Jordanus, around 1329. In discussing the "Third India", Jordanus records a number of fanciful stories about the land and its king, called by Europeans Prester John. After this point, an African location became increasingly popular, and by the 15th century, "Prester John" was the name by which Europeans knew the Ethiopian emperor. The Ethiopians reacted with a mixture of confusion, irritation, and amusement when Europeans insisted on calling their monarch by that name, but there was no dissuading them. They had spent so long searching for Prester John that they weren't about to give him up once they had found him. By the time the emperor Lebna Dengel and the Portuguese had established diplomatic contact with each other in 1520, Prester John was a synonym for negus.

Related Topics:
Jordanus - 1329 - 15th century - Lebna Dengel - Portuguese - 1520 - Negus

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It should be noted that while Ethiopia has been argued as the genesis of the Prester John legend for many years, this is not widely accepted today.

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