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 the Mongol Empire

In 1221 Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Acre returned from the disastrous Fifth Crusade with good news: King David of India, the son or grandson of Prester John, had mobilized his armies against the Saracens. He had already conquered Persia, then under the Khwarezmid Empire's control, and was moving on towards Baghdad as well. This descendent of the great king who had defeated the Seljuks in 1144 planned to reconquer and rebuild Jerusalem.

Related Topics:
1221 - Jacques de Vitry - Acre - Fifth Crusade - Persia - Khwarezmid Empire - Baghdad

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"King David", as it turned out, was no benevolent Nestorian monarch nor even a Christian, but Genghis Khan. His reign took the story of Prester John in a new direction.

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The rise of the Mongol Empire gave western Christians the opportunity to visit lands they had never seen before. The belief that a lost Nestorian kingdom existed in the east, or at least that the Crusader States' salvation depended on an alliance with an Eastern monarch, accounts for the numerous Christian ambassadors and missionaries sent to Mongols, such as the Franciscan Giovanni da Pian del Carpini in 1245 and William of Rubruck in 1253.

Related Topics:
Mongol Empire - Giovanni da Pian del Carpini - 1245 - William of Rubruck

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The link between Prester John and Genghis Khan was elaborated upon at this time as the Prester became identified with Genghis' foster father, Wang Khan Toghrul of the Kerait. In the accounts of fairly truthful chroniclers and explorers such as Marco Polo, Jean de Joinville, and Odoric of Pordenone, Prester John loses much of his mythical veneer as he becomes a more realistically-portrayed earthly monarch.

Related Topics:
Wang Khan - Kerait - Marco Polo - Jean de Joinville - Odoric of Pordenone

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Joinville describes in his chronicle a "wise man" who unites all the Tartar tribes and leads them to victory against their strongest enemy, Prester John. William of Rubruck says a certain "Vut", lord of the Keraits and brother to the Nestorian King John, was defeated by the Mongols under Genghis. Genghis made off with Vut's daughter and married her to his son. Their union produced Möngke, the Khan at the time William wrote. According to Marco Polo, the war between the Prester and Genghis started when Genghis, new ruler of the rebellious Tartars, asked for the hand of Prester John's daughter in marriage. Angered that his lowly vassal would make such a request, Prester John denied him in no uncertain terms. In the war that followed, Genghis triumphed and Prester John was killed.

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The historical figure behind these accounts, Toghrul, was in fact a Christian monarch defeated by Genghis. He had fostered the future Khan after the death of his father and was one of his early allies, but the two had a falling out. After Toghrul rejected a proposal to wed his son and daughter to Genghis' children, the rift between them grew until war broke out in 1203.

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The major characteristic of Prester John tales from this period is the kings' portrayal not as an invincible hero, but merely one of many adversaries defeated by the Mongols. But as the Mongol Empire collapsed, Europeans began to shift away from the idea that Prester John had ever really been a Central Asian king. At any rate they had little hope of finding him there, as travel in the region became dangerous without the security the Empire had provided. In works such as the Travels of Sir John Mandeville http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/mandeville.html and Historia Trium Regum by John of Hildesheim, Prester John's kingdom tends to regain its fantastic aspects and finds itself located not on the steppes of Central Asia, but in India proper or some other exotic locale. Wolfram von Eschenbach tied the history of Prester John to the Holy Grail legend in his poem Parzival, where the Prester is the son of the Grail maiden and the Saracen Feirefiz.

Related Topics:
Travels of Sir John Mandeville - John of Hildesheim - Wolfram von Eschenbach - Holy Grail - Parzival - Feirefiz

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