Prester John
Prester John (Latin: Presbyter Johannes) was a legendary Christian patriarch, presbyter, and king. Stories popular in Europe in the 12th to the 17th centuries told of a Nestorian patriarch and king who was said to rule over a Christian nation lost amid the pagans and Muslims in the Orient.[1]: 28 The accounts were often embellished with various tropes of medieval popular fantasy, depicting Prester John as a descendant of the Three Magi, ruling a kingdom full of riches, marvels, and strange creatures.
At first, Prester John was imagined to reside in India. Tales of the Nestorian Christians' evangelistic success there and of Thomas the Apostle's subcontinental travels as documented in works like the Acts of Thomas probably provided the first seeds of the legend. After the coming of the Mongols to the Western world, accounts placed the king in Central Asia, and eventually Portuguese explorers came to believe that they had found him in Ethiopia.
Though its immediate genesis is unclear, the legend of Prester John drew strongly from earlier accounts of the Orient and of Westerners' travels there. Particularly influential were the stories of Saint Thomas the Apostle's proselytizing in India, recorded especially in the 3rd-century work known as the Acts of Thomas. This text inculcated in Westerners an image of India as a place of exotic wonders and offered the earliest description of Saint Thomas establishing a Christian sect there, motifs that loomed large over later accounts of Prester John.[2]
Similarly, distorted reports of movements in Asia of the Church of the East (Nestorianism) informed the legend as well. This church had gained a wide following in the Eastern nations and engaged the Western imagination as an assemblage both exotic and familiarly Christian.[3] Particularly inspiring were the Church of the East's missionary successes among the Mongols and Turks of Central Asia; French historian René Grousset suggests that the Prester John story may have had its origins in the Kerait clan, which had thousands of its members join the Church of the East shortly after the year 1000. By the 12th century, the Kerait rulers were still following a custom of bearing Christian names, which may have fueled the legend.[4]
Additionally, the tradition may have drawn from the shadowy early Christian figure John the Presbyter of Syria, whose existence is first inferred by the ecclesiastical historian and bishop Eusebius of Caesarea based on his reading of earlier church fathers.[5] This man, said in one document to be the author of two of the Epistles of John,[6] was supposed to have been the teacher of the martyr bishop Papias, who had in turn taught Irenaeus. However, little links this figure, supposedly active in the late 1st century, to the Prester John legend beyond the name.[7] The title "Prester" is an adaptation of the Greek word "πρεσβύτερος, presbuteros", literally meaning "elder" and used as a title of priests holding a high office (indeed, presbyter is the origin of the English word priest).[8][9]
Later accounts of Prester John borrowed heavily from literary texts concerning the East, including the great body of ancient and medieval geographical and travel literature. Details were often lifted from literary and pseudohistorical accounts, such as the tale of Sinbad the Sailor.[10] The Alexander Romance, a fabulous account of Alexander the Great's conquests, was especially influential in this regard.[11]
