Methods and Key Terms

This Element is designed for nonspecialists and curious researchers who may have crossed paths with the legend in their studies. I am aware that, for especially those unacquainted with the themes of medieval and early modern history and literature, the sheer number of geographical, biographical, theological, and cultural references may threaten to impede understanding of the Prester John myth. Even Charles Beckingham, the veteran researcher of the legend, teased that its study is “as inexhaustible as any scholar’s appetite is insatiable” (Beckingham, Reference Beckingham, Beckingham and Hamilton1996: 22). Therefore, in addition to providing an overview of the writers and narratives that the legend of Prester John influenced, this Element offers an interactive experience that allows readers to learn more about any point of interest encountered in the course of reading this text.

In this capacity, the Element draws on my work on The International Prester John Project (IPJP).Footnote ¹⁰ This digital platform hosted by the Global Middle Ages Project (G-MAP) began as an attempt to better understand the transmission of the Prester John legend across space and time.Footnote ¹¹ I have since spent a decade collecting and organizing six centuries’ worth of Prester John lore into a hybrid narrative and digital archive designed to function as a user-friendly resource on this legend. For e-readers of this Element, many texts, figures, and key ideas mentioned in what follows are hyperlinked to a corresponding page at IPJP, which provides additional context, analysis, and references to the pages of related texts, along with visualizations.Footnote ¹² Such a format lets me continuously update contextual references to give this creaturely legend a living framework.

These individual pages on IPJP provide readers with a more thorough overview and contextualization of texts, which are then tagged with all other Prester John pages that reference them. For example, clicking on (or searching for) Otto of Freising’s Historia de Duabus Civitatibus not only provides additional historical background and scholarly assessment of the narrative but also contains embedded links to a number of related texts, navigates to thematic collections of narratives that concern Otto’s chronicle (“Popes and Prester John”; “Prester John and ‘Nestorianism’”; “Chronicles and Prester John”), and provides bibliographical references. This is the case for nearly all names, texts, and themes in this Element, whether or not they are hyperlinked. The primary purpose of this Element is to provide an achronological, thematically organized overview of a remarkably durable legend, but when supplemented with IPJP, I hope to also afford readers an opportunity to get lost in the archive of the massive Prester John corpus.

This Element represents the results of studying the patterns I have observed in putting together the IPJP archive. I have now cataloged hundreds of generically diverse texts written by authors of varied backgrounds, each attempting to add a sliver of clarity to the mysteries and promises teased within the LOPJ. Because of the diverse backgrounds of those who wrote on the legend, Prester John comes to serve often contradictory historical and ideological roles: Lord of Greater India, Ethiopian monarch, “Nestorian” Mongol,Footnote ¹³ inherited title, literary character, utopian myth, and overblown rumor. In roughly the same decade that Wolfram von Eschenbach integrated Prester John into Arthuriana by making him the son of Feirefiz (Parzival’s biracial half-brother), Jacques de Vitry prophesied the arrival of King David, the son or grandson of Prester John, as a potential savior to help the Christian army of the Fifth Crusade defeat Islam once and for all. To better explain the legend’s expansions and contradictions, I distinguish two salient features of the legend that help account for its longevity: the elastic return to the legend’s primary concerns across centuries of Prester John narratives and, relatedly, the malleability of the legend’s epistemological framework. While it is not possible to neatly categorize all the variations one encounters in these Prester John narratives, in this Element I identify six distinct but permeable narrative paths that the legend followed, each of which contributes to a larger coherence by returning to these motifs of elasticity and malleability.

The sheer variety of Prester John narrative styles, from skeptical dismissals to alleged firsthand encounters, attests to the malleability of this legend. That malleability, combined with Prester John’s imagined movement from Asia to Africa and back, is made possible by the variety of ideological commitments that the legend trafficked among and between: xenophobia,Footnote ¹⁴ solipsism,Footnote ¹⁵ hybridity,Footnote ¹⁶ apocalypticism,Footnote ¹⁷ messianism,Footnote ¹⁸ utopianism,Footnote ¹⁹ among others. Travelers, writers, and readers from the thirteenth century forward were left with a legend that not only absorbed contradiction but encouraged revision. This is what I refer to as the legend’s malleable narrative framework.

By elasticity here I mean that regardless of the shape a Prester John narrative took, the narrative paths “spring back” to the legend’s initial configuration. This initial configuration of the legend is marked by four foundational themes: Latin Christendom’s perceived need for outside assistance against foreign threats (Christian and otherwise), the receipt of some sort of future-directed pledge for assistance to aid against those threats, the attempts to enclose such threats within a larger Catholic framework, and the larger desire for the unknown parts of the world to be revealed as an extension of what was already familiar and known (Taylor, Reference Taylor and Frakes2011).Footnote ²⁰ Prester John remained entangled in Catholic Europe’s understanding of its place in the world because it was adaptable to many contexts (malleability) and because the throughline crises and existential threats that produced the legend were never satisfactorily resolved (elasticity).

Finally, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by a Prester John “narrative” and “narrative path.” For the purposes of this Element, a Prester John narrative is a text that features Prester John (or one of his common aliases) and offers an implicit or overt commentary on one or more of the legend’s foundational themes. The term “narrative path” then refers to a group of Prester John narratives that share a common feature, whether of identification (Mongol or Crusader, for instance) or function (such as literary figure). This method of organization helps avoid the pitfalls that attend a chronological organization of Prester John stories, since one of the most interesting features of the legend is how often contradictory versions of the legend were being disseminated simultaneously. In choosing the term “path,” I also deliberately avoid discussion of genre, a modern construct, which is not only quite fluid throughout the Middle Ages but also obscures some of the interesting connections evident across different narrative forms. As I hope to show, these narrative paths are at once distinct and permeable.

Rather than create neat historical or generic categories to delineate different eras of the Prester John legend, this Element will focus on the ways that communities – Crusade advocates, Franciscan missionaries, Italian merchants, Portuguese viceroys, Hebrew scholars, armchair sinologists, Ethiopian courts, papal syndicates – patterned stories about Prester John around specific features of his character that then signaled some political, economic, and/or cultural utility. Each section will discuss the genealogy and transmission of one narrative path as a means of understanding how the legend of Prester John was able to thrive and evolve for centuries despite a proliferation of contradictory descriptions and a lack of evidence concerning his material existence.

Prester John and the Global Middle Ages

Before moving on to a discussion of the Prester John legend’s foundational themes, it is necessary to assess to what degree Prester John, an imaginary priest-king who mattered almost exclusively for Latin Europe, can be considered a “global” figure. A simple, unsatisfying answer is to report all the places where medieval and early modern Europeans sought Prester John’s kingdom: from the Asian Steppe to India, China, Russia, Tibet, and Japan; from Nubia, Benin, and Ethiopia to Columbus’ “New World.”

Such a Eurocentric view of early globalism privileges a Latin Christian experience with and response to intercultural connection. A representative perspective is attested in a 1710 English translation of Portuguese Jesuit historian Balthazar Téllez’s The Travel of the Jesuits in Ethiopia (1660), which summarizes what Portugal had itself gained from the world in its search for Prester John (qtd. in Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 241):

In such a view, it is the world itself that benefits from the European extraction and acquisition of Africa’s and Asia’s resources and knowledge: global access understood as a means of proto-nationalist self-empowerment. While certainly worthy of study, this vantage on globality routinely offers a myopic and/or overly bellicose perspective: intercultural exchanges couched in terms of conquest, heresy, access, legend, a missionary eye. On the other hand, the global history of Prester John makes evident the way Latin Christendom gathered the slow trickle of global news that entered Europe, often through the Mediterranean, and then filtered such tidings through an inherited ideological framework that reflected desires for a globalized Christendom. And yet the terrestrial and textual excursions to seek Prester John’s kingdom did, in fact, open up Europe’s engagement with the wider world, encouraging reciprocated diplomatic missions and inaugurating new intercultural communication from cultures across Asia and Africa. An important vector in Europe’s attempt to enter a global information economy, Prester John remained poised at key moments in this history of globalization, tied up with proto-colonial excursions to the Indian subcontinent, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Americas.

In addition to its influence on Europe’s vision of the wider world, the story of Prester John’s textual migrations engages with key themes in the historiography of global history. The legend aligns well with the so-called vectors of connectivity that have been identified as essential to the wider project of global history: diffusion, outreach, dispersal, expansion, and attraction (Belich, Darwin, and Wickham, Reference Belich, Darwin, Wickham, Belich, Darwin, Frenz and Wickham2016: 3–23). The notions of dispersal and expansion merit comment as an effective parallel framework for my concept of elasticity. The authors liken these two forces to “a stretched rubber band, which either breaks into fragments or remains intact” (p. 5). One way to put in perspective the irrational longevity of the Prester John legend is to understand it as a rubber band that continuously expanded as it was stretched but almost always “snapped back” to its initial shape.

Finally, this is a legend globally studied from a wide variety of academic lenses. It was once nearly only academic historians of medieval Latin Europe who studied Prester John. However, in the twenty-first century, interest in this legend has steadily grown, and the collective understanding of its impacts has been made clearer by researchers from an expanding variety of academic specialties. This phenomenon was well-represented by a 2023 conference at Sapienza University of Rome entitled “Retelling Prester John: Frontiers, Routes, and Emotions of a Failed Encounter,” based on a bilingual issue of Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni (ed. Ferrara, 2023), which featured scholars from disciplines and specialties that include literary studies, anthropology, the history of religions, world mythologies, medieval Latin philology, crusading history, Greek studies, Jewish philosophy, Syrian literature, Byzantine and Islamic history, late Ottoman history, and Tibetan studies, among other specialties. As often as possible, I defer to such experts.

After a brief treatment of the legend’s foundational texts and themes, this Element proceeds along the following six paths: “Prester John as Crusader”; “Prester John as Mongol”; “Prester John as African Monarch”; “Pop History Prester John”; “Prester John as Literary Figure”; and “False Etymologies, Prester John as a Title, and the Dalai Lama.” The paths themselves focus on the specific narrative features that distinguished that version of Prester John, and they will also discuss textual features that attest to an abiding preoccupation with the foundational themes of the legend established in the twelfth century. Following these sections is a coda on race in the Prester John legend with a concluding discussion of two twentieth-century Prester John narratives that help clarify this legend’s place in modernity.

Before moving on to the path sections themselves, the following section reexamines the initial context of the Prester John legend to establish four abiding thematic features of the Prester John story that reemerge across the six narrative paths.

Patriarch John

As is well-rehearsed, the traditional beginnings of the Prester John legend involve four core texts: two 1122 narratives that mention the arrival to Rome of an Indian Archbishop of St.Thomas Christians who presides over annual miracles; the retelling of a historically mistranslated 1145 anecdote regarding a puissant so-called Nestorian Christian who has announced intentions to defend the Holy Land (1157); and the legend’s central narrative, the boastful, ever-expanding compendium of European lore about the wider world’s marvels known as The Letter of Prester John (c. 1165). These four texts establish a range of possibilities concerning the identity and intentions of the mysterious priest-king: a figure of some historical repute but one also who traffics in the moth-eaten imaginings of a millennium’s worth of European writing on the “Orient.”

In the first of these 1122 texts, commonly referred to as De adventu, a man hailing from India known as Patriarch John arrives to the curia of Pope Calixtus II (r. 1119–1124) in Rome.Footnote ²¹ Introducing himself to the pope, John reports the vast wealth and power of Hulna, his Christian kingdom guarded by the shrine of St.Thomas, which produced miracles in the surrounding area. A contemporaneous letter written by Odo of Rheims (1118–1151), abbot of St. Remy, addressed to a “Count Thomas” affirms De adventu, corroborating the miracles attributed to St. Thomas. In both texts, Patriarch John’s visit to Rome testifies to a commitment toward a global Christendom; in addition to acknowledging the authority of the Catholic Church, Patriarch John actively advocates for the reunification of Eastern and Western churches.Footnote ²² Both texts also make explicit that these Indian Christian communities of “St. Thomas Christians” remain hostile only to non-Christians.

Most Latin Christians would not have been familiar with the tradition of St. Thomas, as the Acts of Thomas and Gospel of Thomas were probably written in third-century Edessa, likely in Syriac. It was not until the era of Prester John that popular Latin legends about St. Thomas began circulating in the West; this renewed interest either was a product of or led to the twelfth-century Latin translation of the Acts of Thomas. Latin Christians thereafter became familiar with Jesus’ instruction for Thomas to proselytize Christianity in the East, as recorded in the Acts of Thomas.Footnote ²³ The Apostle Thomas provided Patriarch John with an Eastern Christian forebear that helped Latin Christian readers maintain the powerful expectation of an already Christian East.

Response to Initial Context

Scholars have characterized the origins of the Prester John legend in a variety of ways, much of which also anticipates the Prester John narrative paths outlined in the sections that follow. These characterizations tend to describe Prester John as either serving a practical political function or already inhabiting the realm of fantasy. We have, on the one hand, scholarship that grounds the twelfth-century Prester John in the rhetorically grounded reality of diplomatic exigency: an “allegorical figure of a political utopia” (Olschki, Reference Olschki1960: 391) or “a product of the thought-world of the Crusades” (Hamilton, Reference Hamilton, Beckingham and Hamilton1996b: 256). On the other hand, we find scholarship that positions this early era in the more abstract realm of imagination: “a work of imaginative literature” (Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 46), “epistolary fantasy” (Heng, Reference Heng2003: 276), “science fiction” (Helleiner, Reference Helleiner1959: 56), “tongue and cheek from beginning to end” (Rachewiltz, Reference Rachelwitz1996: 66), or simply a legend that “was regarded with suspicion” (Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 8).

The purpose of reviewing the earliest details of the Prester John legend, along with the scholarly responses to them, is not to relitigate the belief systems from which the legend emerged or even to emphasize the variety of academic understandings of these early years of Prester John lore. It is instead to contend that the variation and contradiction within and among the five narrative paths that follow are present from the very beginnings of the legend. More specifically, the grounds for understanding Prester John as historical/real (paths one, two, three, six) or rhetorical/imaginative (paths one, four, five, six) reflect not only the lack of clear medieval distinctions between these narrative modes but also a malleability discernible within the legend’s murky origins. This early tolerance of variation helps make possible not only the legend’s durability but also what we might call the “negative capability” that allowed for contradictory narrative paths to perpetuate themselves simultaneously.

Foundations of Euro-Ethiopian Exchange

Prester John first appears in Ethiopia (or, specifically, in “Abassia”) on the now-lost map (c. 1320s) of the Genoese priest Giovanni da Carignano (c. 1250–1329),Footnote ⁴⁴ which situates Prester John’s kingdom between the White and Blue Nile (Salvadore, Reference Salvadore2016: 1–3). Carignano’s map is distinguished for its astonishing accuracy and its notable lack of classical and earlier medieval geographical miscognitions. His was the first map to depict Scandinavia as a peninsula, for example, as well as the first to plot a “Terra Abaise” in the Nile Valley populated by “Christiani Nigri.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Like Jordanus’ Mirabilia, Giovanni’s map exists outside of (or prior to) a larger narrative tradition; unlike Jordanus, this historical aberration appears to have been rooted in observed reality, albeit secondhand. Giovanni’s church, San Marco al Molo, was strategically situated in the old port of Genoa, which, along with Venice, functioned as Latin Christendom’s premier nexus of trade, including that of slaves, and a central node in an emergently global information economy. Giovanni’s access to world-wise seafarers certainly sharpened his cartographic mind, but the contents of the long-lost commentary raise the map to the stuff of legend.

According to Jacopo Filippo Foresti (1434–1520), writing more than 150 years after the map’s creation in his Supplementum chronicarum (1483), the once-attached commentary to Carignano’s map attests to a 1306 embassy of Ethiopian Christians who, after a brief tour of Europe, visited Genoa after and spoke with Giovanni. The Supplementum relates the story of a powerful patriarch called Prester John who had sent a coterie north of the Muslim world (i.e. north of Mamluk Egypt) to Spain, Rome, and Avignon to seek a military alliance with a man ambiguously referred to as “king of Spains,” a distant Christian ruler who might aid Ethiopia against “infidels,” likely referring to the incursions of the Ifat Sultanate. Prester John scholars, with a notable exception (Krebs, Reference Krebs2019), have generally accepted the veracity of this alleged visit, in one form or another, despite a lack of contemporaneous corroboration outside of a single manuscript recently studied by Bausi and Chiesa (Reference Bausi and Chiesa2019).Footnote ⁴⁶ Whether or not the 1306 embassy actually arrived, the placement of Prester John’s realm on Carignano’s map remains a historical fact. Moreover, the narrative Foresti recorded in posterity speaks to the nimble narrative framework of the Prester John legend, here seen inverted, with the Ethiopian Christians seeking a titled warrior within a vaguely understood Christian kingdom beyond Dar al-Islam.

By the middle of the fourteenth century, patterns began to emerge that suggested increased familiarity, if not direct contact, between Ethiopia and Italy. Most of this discourse centered on an Ethiopian Prester John. Fellow Genoan cartographer Angelino Dulcert, a founder of the so-called Mallorcan School of mapmaking, places Prester John in the Horn of Africa – on the upper Nile, next to “Abdeselib” – on his 1339 map.Footnote ⁴⁷ For Dulcert, the negus of Ethiopia “Senap” and the “black Christian” Prester John are two different people, a likely testament to the tradition, established by encyclopedic authorities like Isidore of Seville (Barney et al., Reference Barney, Lewis, Beach and Berghof2006: XIV.v.16), of an eastern and a western Ethiopia. John de’ Marignolli, who traveled to China from 1342 to 1347 after the death of John of Monte Corvino, follows his fourteenth-century predecessors in assigning Prester John to Africa without having visited the continent himself. Quickly shifting his highly digressive Chronica Boemorum into an expanded travel narrative, the Franciscan places Prester John in an Ethiopia encircled by the biblical Gyon River, which the author reports is also called the Nile (Kurt, Reference Kurt2013: 6). Here too, Prester John holds the power to shut off Egypt from the Nile’s water, a narrative trope, expanded on below in “Prester John and the Nile,” that can be understood as foundational for texts of this narrative path.

The Liber pereginationis, an account of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem written only five years after Friar Jordanus’ Mirabilia, represents the earliest written text of this Ethiopian narrative path in which Prester John is discussed as possessing specific military leverage over Islam. As the king of Nubia, Ethiopia, and Egypt, Prester John here has full control over the waters of the Nile; this king of “black Ethiopians” is “more powerful than the sultan,” Jacob learns in the Holy Land (qtd. in Salvadore, Reference Salvadore2016: 5). The anonymous Castilian travelogue The Book of Knowledge, a more fanciful text discussed later as part of the hybrid narrative path, features an imaginary friar who visits the kingdom of Prester John, here also called the empire of “Abdeselib,” following Dulcert. In this text, the Prester is king of Ethiopia and Nubia, also encircled by the traditional biblical rivers, although, in this case, the Euphrates (rather than the Gyon) is cited as the central waterway. Last of these fourteenth-century Ethiopian Prester John narratives, crusading enthusiast Philippe de Mézières’ “Dream of an Old Pilgrim” (1389) returns Prester John to the realm of the LOPJ: ruler over the “Three Indias,” situated within Africa, on the border of the terrestrial paradise. That these texts differ in scope, genre, and provenance testifies to some early and abiding association between Prester John and Africa.

Some fifteen years after the Chronicon Boemorum was written, Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV (r. 1346–1378), the man who commissioned the chronicle, allegedly received a letter from the Ethiopian king. This letter (c. 1370), composed in Italian and addressed solely to the emperor, was written in the voice of “King Voddomaradeg, son of the most excellent King of Ethiopia … Prester John, King of Greater and Lesser India” (qtd. in Salvadore, Reference Salvadore2011: 602).Footnote ⁴⁸ Salvadore argues that the letter, an almost certain Italian forgery that nonetheless leverages some knowledge about Ethiopia, attests to Europe’s fourteenth-century familiarity with Christian Ethiopia, if not with Emperor Wedem Arad (r. 1299–1314) himself, given what Salvadore, among others, has noted is a proximal phonetic resemblance (Salvadore, Reference Salvadore2016: 6).Footnote ⁴⁹ Krebs notes that this letter is one of four fourteenth-century texts to refer specifically to Ethiopian nägäśt (Krebs, Reference Krebs2020: 99). To add one more layer of curiosity, a fifteenth-century manuscript of the LOPJ (Brewer’s MS.44) addresses itself to the same Charles IV, which suggests subsequent generations may have become familiar with the intercontinental discourse that shaped the letter from King Voddomaradeg (Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 67n14, 303). Other correspondences with Ethiopian nägäśt followed. The first secular ruler to attempt to contact an Ethiopian negus was English King Henry IV, who clearly had the legendary priest-king on his mind: His 1400 letter was in fact addressed not to Dawit I (r. 1382–1413) but to Prester John. In his letter, he echoes Prester John lore that was now centuries old, requesting that the Ethiopian sovereign “rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the Infidels” and planning to meet this Prester John in Jerusalem to set these events in motion (qtd. in Krebs, Reference Krebs2020: 116).

The history of Prester John in Africa prior to the era of Portuguese sea exploration created the conditions by which the legend was able to survive in Africa. The scholarly focus on Portugal derives, in part, from a habit of early modern writers, who frequently misattributed the original Prester John and Ethiopia connection to the late fifteenth-century diplomatic and commercial mission of Pêro da Covilhã, who reached Ethiopia sometime after 1478. However, at least six letters addressed to an Ethiopian Prester John from European kings and popes predated the Portuguese courtier’s expedition.Footnote ⁵⁰ Much of Europe’s earlier fifteenth-century interest in sub-Saharan Africa was due to the Ethiopian embassies that arrived in Europe early in the century.

Ethiopians in Europe

The first substantively documented Ethiopian embassy arrived in Europe in 1402, and another twenty-one Ethiopian “missions” to Latin Europe are attested from 1402 to 1543 (Krebs, Reference Krebs2020: 87–88).Footnote ⁵¹ These missions were overwhelmingly understood as sent not by a specific Ethiopian negus but by Prester John, Lord of the Indies. Although this misapplied title became a common European substitute for the title for the Ethiopian sovereign, the appellation continued to carry expectations unreasonable to set upon any mortal ruler. Meanwhile, by the middle of the fifteenth century, there were small Ethiopian communities in Rome, Venice, and Cyprus (Hamilton, Reference Hamilton, Beckingham and Hamilton1996b: 253).

The Italian phase of this path has roots in the fourteenth century, but the well-documented arrival of sub-Saharan Africans to Genoa, Venice, and Rome throughout the fifteenth century (Salvadore, Reference Salvadore2016: 1–35) transformed the idea of an Ethiopian Prester John from hopeful rumor to actionable reality. Less than two years after King Henry IV of England sent a letter to the “King of Abyssinia, Prester John,” the first of these embassies arrived in Venice in 1402. With Florentine Antonio Bartoli as guide, the Ethiopian embassy, sent by Emperor Dawit I, traveled through Venice with valuable gifts and returned to Ethiopia with gifts in turn, as well as a promised visit from European artisans. These early fifteenth-century visits helped open a “contact zone” between several Italian republics and Ethiopia that, combined with the notion of contact with Prester John’s kingdom, inspired both military and mercantile hopes. Salvadore argues that these African travelers were “welcomed as intellectuals and diplomats in a variety of European locales” (Salvadore, Reference Salvadore2016: 3). That several of these missions to Europe were “chaperoned” by a European also suggests the possibility of a community of Europeans who had already reached Ethiopia and associated themselves with the administrations therein.

Continual visits of Ethiopians to Rome resulted in an intercultural exchange through which Rome became Europe’s nexus for Africanist knowledge, “turning what had been a whimsical interest in Prester John into nothing less than a field of study” (Salvadore, Reference Salvadore2016: 72). These Italian encounters with Ethiopians, who made their way into the Mediterranean through the Middle East, alerted other European locales to the possibility of collaboration with sub-Saharan Africa and its powerful Christian king. Neither the Catholic Church nor the secular sovereigns of Europe had unmasked the legendary facade they affixed onto the ruler behind these African embassies. The first among these non-Italian points of interest for Ethiopia was Aragon, given its king’s aggressive expansion of power into the Mediterranean in the first half of the fifteenth century. As Dawit’s successors and sons Yeshaq I (r. 1414–1429) and Zara Yaqob (r. 1434–1468) themselves sent embassies to Europe, these rulers, in an echo of the “king of Spains” sought in the alleged 1306 embassy, shifted their attention to Iberia.

Alfonso V, king of Aragon, Naples, and Sicily (r. 1416–1458), understanding the leverage that Italian city-states had now come to exercise in the burgeoning realm of global trade – in part due to their new connections with sub-Saharan Africa – embarked on a program to seize European control of this new, lucrative economy. He viewed Prester John as a key ally in this endeavor, imagining that such an alliance would provide military leverage along with the distinction of making first contact with the priest-king. Emperor Yeshaq, in a return to the inversion of the traditional Prester John narrative structure, desired an alliance in which European power(s) would invade Mamluk Egypt from the north while the emperor’s forces would simultaneously enter Egypt from the south (Petry, Reference Petry2022, 124–125). Ethiopian Christians, who had expanded their European travel into the Iberian Peninsula primarily for the sake of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, reached Alfonso’s court in 1427. At the helm of this embassy was Ali Tabrizi, a Persian merchant active in Cairo and Ethiopia. As Bartoli had requested in Venice, Tabrizi requested European artisans on behalf of Yeshaq but also proposed a double marriage between members of the two royal families. Alfonso appeared to have considered the proposal worthy of a reply. He equipped the delegation for the return journey and arranged to dispatch both a group of artisans and a personal representative, Pere de Bonia, who was instructed to collect intelligence on Ethiopia and, in particular, on the marriage proposal, which would have seen Emperor Yeshaq I (r. 1414–1429) wed an Ethiopian noblewoman to Alfonso’s brother, Pedro (1406–1438). News of the visit reached as far as Rome, as recorded by Cardinal Guillaume Fillastre, but despite the investment, the envoys never reached Ethiopia.Footnote ⁵²

That the return embassy never reached Ethiopia only strengthened the desire among Alfonso and other European secular leaders to contact Prester John. As no European had yet traveled to Ethiopia and returned to tell the tale firsthand, leaders were still relying on, at best, secondhand accounts, all of which continued to map this twelfth-century legend onto fifteenth-century Ethiopia. The Council of Florence (1441) had identified Prester John as the Ethiopian Emperor Zara Yaqob (r. 1434–1468), renewing an already active search. Dominican Pietro Ranzano in his universal geography Annales omnium temporum records the observations of fellow Italian Pietro Rombulo, who claimed to have lived at the Ethiopian court for thirty-seven years and who claimed to be an ambassador from Zara Yaqob to King Alfonso. Rombulo told Ranzano exactly what he (and Alfonso) wanted to hear: This powerful king with a long narrative history of making powerful marriage alliances had immense wealth, tributary kings, and a mighty Christian army (Krebs, Reference Krebs2020: 113). Most interesting to Alfonso, however, was Prester John’s relationship to that African waterway that had so fascinated crusaders and geographers alike: the Nile River.

Prester John and the Nile

As long as there were communities of non-European Christians who held a military advantage against perceived enemies of the Catholic Church there would remain incentive to rhetorically assimilate such communities into the historical/geographical tropes most familiar to a European readership. In an elastic return to the legend’s desire to reveal the unknown world as a continuation of inherited knowledge and expectations, Prester John retained an association with the River Nile that persisted for several centuries and can be found in many texts of this narrative path. The ability to control the Nile functioned first and foremost as a military intelligence. The tradition in which the Ethiopian negus held control over the flow of this powerful waterway dates to the eleventh century (Knobler, Reference Knobler2017: 30). This association abided into the period in which Europeans sought military aid from Ethiopia, glimpsed, for example, when Ethiopian negus ‘Amda-Seyon (r. 1314–1344) revived a threat against the Mamluks that he would turn the country into a desert by cutting off the Nile’s flow (Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 148).Footnote ⁵³ Since that point, European writers repeatedly claimed this power for Prester John.

The European fascination with this river hearkens back to the Bible and the geographical writings of antiquity. As mentioned, Europeans associated the Nile with the biblical Gihon (Genesis 2:13), which was in that book considered one of four rivers to branch off from the Phison, the waterway that ran from Eden through paradise (Genesis 2:10–12). For the Greek traveler Cosmas Indicopleustes (fl. sixth century), an important source for medieval European geography, the biblical Phison was in fact the river Indus, which runs from the Arabian Sea into the Indus valley before branching off into the Himalayas and Tibet (more on this in the final narrative path section).Footnote ⁵⁴ The history of the European understanding of this river also helps historicize Europe’s frequent conflation of sub-Saharan Africa with India, as it was not infrequently attested that the Nile and Indus were a single river (Mukherjee, Reference Mukherjee2018: 259). The Nile was also an important touchstone for medieval Isidoran (so-called T and O) maps, in which it is often depicted as the body of water that divides Africa and Asia. According to the Liber monstrorum, the fertile Nile is itself responsible for the genesis of monsters (Relaño, Reference Relaño2002: 34).

In addition to its biblical, geographic importance, there was also the topic of its source. In a story passed down from Ptolemy, several medieval and early modern geographers and cartographers placed the Nile’s headwaters in a snow-capped mountain range in Ethiopia, commonly referred to as the “Mountains of the Moon.” The search for these mountains and their elusive headwaters remained a preoccupation for European explorers and armchair travelers well into the eighteenth century (Relaño, Reference Relaño2002: 197–204); the myth is present in narratives as late as John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), Jerónimo Lobo’s A Short Relation of the River Nile (1669), and James Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790), among other texts. For these reasons, the story of the African Prester John cannot be understood outside of the long history of European fascination with the Nile.

Some earlier writers of this narrative path, including the Augustinian Jacopo da Verona (1335),Footnote ⁵⁵ as well as the Franciscan John de’ Marignolli (c. 1355), believed Prester John held direct control over the river’s flow and could himself reduce Egypt to a crippling state of drought. Another group of writers elaborate on this connection from reported secondhand accounts. Niccolò da Conti relates to fellow traveler Pero Tafur that the Nile was “water of paradise” and describes Prester John’s attempt to seek its source in the Mountains of the Moon as recorded in the latter’s Travels and Adventures (c. 1454) (Tafur, Reference Tafur1926, ch. 8, ch. 20). According to Tafur’s retelling, two intrepid explorers were able to discover the source but refused to return to their party, who left the men on the mountain. The Burgundian Bertrandon de la Broquière’s The Voyage to Outremer (1457) situates watchtowers in a canyon alongside the Nile, which Prester John “could easily move … to another course” but “let it be because there are many Christians living on the aforesaid [river]” (qtd. in Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 216). Prester John’s restraint is also present for the Venetian Alessandro Zorzi, who from 1470 to 1538 recorded the first- and secondhand accounts of Italian travelers to Ethiopia. He learns from a “Brother Raphael” that “Presta Jani could take the water of the Nile from the Moors, so that it did not reach Cairo, but that he will not because he fears that the Moors would ruin the churches” and endanger the Christian monks spread throughout Egypt (qtd. in Salvadore, Reference Salvadore2016: 30). Broquière’s and Zorzi’s explicit mentions of Cairo in their accounts recall the failures of the Fifth Crusade, especially since the former refers in a later passage to the Ethiopian king Lebna Dengel as “Davit” (Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 218). If nothing else, this callback to the long-anticipated King David, son of Prester John, helps illustrate the degree to which the Prester John project remained tied to the ambitions of the Catholic Church. After all, these stories circulated only 100 years after the Christian army of the Fifth Crusade was flooded into defeat by the very same river, and 200 years after the earliest rumors of a Prester John figure noted that he was not able to cross the River Tigris to aid the crusaders.

In George Abbot’s Briefe Description of the Whole Worlde (1599), Prester John’s threat becomes realized, as the author reports that Prester John had in fact flooded Egypt after “the great Turke” refused to pay Egypt’s customary annual tribute to the priest-king (Abbot, 1664: 155–156). Later texts make more tangential associations. The Czech Franciscan Remedius Prutký, who was told by the Ethiopian emperor himself that there was no Prester John there, still ties the Prester John legend to the Nile, arguing in his Travels (1752) that it was the Arabic word for the Nile, “Aian,” that European travelers mistook for the John they so desperately sought (qtd. in Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 265). Traces of these ideas can be found in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516) and Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1590), showing how these associations had eclipsed the discourse of medieval and early modern geography and entered into the literary record.Footnote ⁵⁶

Prester John in Cartographic Africa

As a cartographically accurate understanding of Africa was slowly emerging in European cities, early modern mapmakers used the kingdom of Prester John to lend geographic consistency and epistemological continuity to their presentation of the continent, often in explicit reference to the Nile.Footnote ⁵⁷ Most influential among these was the mappaemundi (1459) of the merchant-soldier turned Camaldolese monk Fra Mauro. At the top (east) of Mauro’s circular map, which measured six feet in diameter, the monk identifies Prester John’s kingdom as an immense East African territory, with the land of “Abassia” at its center.Footnote ⁵⁸ In some of the most faded ink on the whole map, below a section of the sinuous Nile, an inscription reads: “Qui el presto Janne fa ressidentia principal.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In inscribed commentary possibly influenced by the stories surrounding the travels of fellow Venetian Niccolò de’ Conti, Mauro links Prester John’s land to the terrestrial paradise by describing how the land’s honey seeps into the water to create, with the aid of the sun, a river of wine (Brooks, Reference Brooks2010: 187). His power is here immense due to “the numbers of his people, who are almost infinite” (p. 187). He also notes the annual flooding of Egypt by the Nile, the source of which, he claims, was to be found in the kingdom of Prester John.

Although considered a crowning achievement of late medieval cartography, Mauro’s map is also an example of a larger cultural tendency that early modern maps continued to exhibit: the reluctance among highly educated Europeans to dissociate from the inherited marvel of the “Old World” even as they became active participants in the burgeoning information economy of a globally interconnected “New World.” Newly arrived, specialized knowledge continued to provide Europe’s cartographers with ongoing geographic nuance, and yet associations with Prester John and the twelfth-century milieu the legend subtended continued to influence Europe’s picture of sub-Saharan Africa. This tendency is evident even in maps that do not expressly identify a kingdom of Prester John. The Egyptus Novelo map (1454–1469), a detailed depiction of the Nile Basin possibly influenced by the presence of an Ethiopian delegation at the Council of Florence, illustrates Ethiopia with accurate place names heretofore undepicted in European cartography as well as with the mythical Mountains of the Moon.Footnote ⁶⁰

While the insistent plotting of an imaginary kingdom on these maps represented an elastic return to an imagined Christian enclosure of the globe, such maps were also practical tools utilized for actual navigational purposes, especially for seafarers. The Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator marketed his 1569 map of the “terrestrial globe” with explicit reference for its navigational utility. Another highly regarded map in its time, the Mercator map depicts Prete Giam magnus imperator Abbissini, the only personage he depicted in all of Africa, as what appears to be a white European seated on a throne holding a cross.Footnote ⁶¹ Brooks notes that Mercator imagined the kingdom of Prester John “as being centered on the upper Nile River, evoking earlier traditions of the mighty priest-king possessing the power to regulate or shut off the flow of the life-giving Nile” (Brooks, Reference Brooks2014: 201). His grandson, also called Gerardus Mercator, depicts an apparently unaged Prester John in nearly the same manner in his 1628 map. In Jodocus Hondius’ 1606 atlas, Prester John gets his own page.Footnote ⁶²

Fra Mauro found a patron for his mappaemundi in a man who prized navigational utility above all: the Portuguese Dom Henrique, so-called Navigator. Combining the Venetian Mauro’s proximity to the most contemporary mercantile and ecclesiastical discourse with the navigational expertise of the Portuguese architect of the so-called Age of Discovery, the Fra Mauro Map (1459) was regarded as a supreme cartographical achievement (Brooks, Reference Brooks2010: 185–191). It was the Portuguese who most utilized such cartographic technology, quite explicitly to find Prester John. In the last phase of this narrative path, the Portuguese attempt to locate Prester John by combining the bellicose desires of the Aragon court with the mercantile aspirations of the Genoans and Venetians.

Portugal and Prester John

By the early fifteenth century, Portugal’s House of Avis began to flourish and envisioned, with the help of Prester John, a mercantile expansion into Africa pinned to hopes of undermining Arab control of the spice trade. Henry the Navigator, son of Portuguese King João I (r. 1385–1433), a major leader of this vision, shared three overarching goals, as chronicled by Gomes Eanes de Zurara: gather knowledge of Africa’s western shores to establish trading relationships, learn of the reach of Islam into Africa, and identify any potential Christian allies against Islam, such as Prester John (Sanceau, Reference Sanceau1944: 5–12; Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 197). The sheer amount of geographical knowledge that Henry sought and devoured led to a rather scattershot approach to finding the kingdom of Prester John. From the fifteenth into the seventeenth century, Portuguese explorers, missionaries, and envoys penned narratives in which they claim to interact with the Ethiopian Prester John themselves or at least had met those who had done so (Sanceau, Reference Sanceau1944; Lawrance, Reference Lawrance1992; Baldridge, Reference Baldridge2012; Salvadore, Reference Salvadore2016: 82–103). Most of these journeys were exceptionally difficult, leading to what Salvadore has described as the “tragic-comic flavor” of these narratives (Salvadore, Reference Salvadore2016: 113). However difficult, a legion of Portuguese missionaries and diplomats published reflections on Prester John’s kingdom between 1450 and 1700.

Henry surmised that an intrepid European might find Prester John’s kingdom from the west by following the Senegal River, which he believed to connect to the Nile. In the 1480s, Diogo Cão said the same about the Congo River (Kurt, Reference Kurt2013: 10). A century later, Duarte Lopes, traveling in west Africa, situated Prester John somewhere east of the Congo in his Report on the Kingdom of the Congo (1591). In a 1455 letter, the Genoan explorer Antoniotto Usodimare cites his physical proximity to the kingdom of Prester John while in Gambia, near Africa’s western coast. As was true with the early modern maps, the journeys inspired by Henry allowed the imaginative legend to influence the European perceptions of Africa. This tendency is most evident in the highly exaggerated narrative of the exploits of Henry’s brother Pedro credited to Gómez de Santisteban. The Book of the Infante Pedro (1515) describes Dom Pedro’s adventures around the “Old World,” which culminates in a trip to a kingdom of Prester John populated with all the landmarks of the LOPJ, in which the hero delivers a letter from the Castilian king. This text went through hundreds of editions from the sixteenth into the eighteenth century from Spanish and Portuguese presses.

Besides Prince Henry, the Portuguese figure most associated with the Portugal and Prester John relationship was Pêro da Covilhã, who in 1493 met Emperor Eskender (r. 1478–1494) and became the first European to record a meeting with an Ethiopian ruler believed to be Prester John. Covilhã and fellow diplomat Afonso de Paiva were commissioned in 1487 by King João II (r. 1481–1495) to find a route through the Holy Land to Ethiopia with instructions to source valuable spices as well as the kingdom of Prester John (Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 201–205; Baldridge, Reference Baldridge2012: 32–37). The two were dispatched just one year before the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias successfully reached East Africa by circumnavigating the continent’s southern tip and five years before the Genoan Columbus, with a personally annotated copy of Polo’s kingdom of Prester John in hand, sailed west to seek that kingdom, among other things (Uebel, Reference 76Uebel and Cohen2001: 270–277; Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 286). Soon after, Vasco da Gama calls after Prester John at East African ports on his way to India, according to the journal (1497–1499) of a crewmember.

Covilhã and his partner separated in Cairo, the former desiring to seek intelligence on the spice trade in India, the latter dying unceremoniously in Egypt’s capital. Covilhã eventually reached Ethiopia in 1493 and was met with a warm reception by Eskender, whom Covilhã understood to be Prester John, and who promised to send him back to Portugal with gifts and the possibility of alliance. However, Eskender died in 1494 and neither of his successors (Na’od and Lebna Dengel) allowed Covilhã to return, marooning the diplomat turned explorer in Ethiopia. Covilhã wrote a letter to the Portuguese king, which may or may not have arrived, and João, perhaps in response or perhaps out of concern, sent two Portuguese Jews, Joseph of Lamego and Abraham of Beja, to find out whether Covilhã had found Prester John (Beckingham, Reference Beckingham, Beckingham and Hamilton1996: 287–289). The outcome of that visit is not clear, but we do know that Covilhã was still there some twenty-five years later when Francisco Álvares arrived at the Ethiopian court with Diogo Lopes de Sequeira in 1520. Álvares recorded Covilhã’s adventures in his A True Relation of the Lands of Prester John of the Indies (which was itself only published by Luis Rodrigues in 1540, after Álvares’ death). Álvares returned to Europe and in 1533 met with Pope Clement VII to discuss what he had learned of this land and its leader, whom Álvares referred to as “the most serene and powerful lord David, king of the great and high Ethiopia, by the masses called Prester John” (qtd. in Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 316).

Álvares’ posthumous account of the exiled Covilhã became one of the most widely read Prester John texts of the early modern period, translated into Italian, French, German, and Spanish by the end of the sixteenth century (Kurt, Reference Kurt2013: 22). The success of the text is somewhat puzzling; it is the only example of a “bestselling” Prester John text that minimizes (or here eliminates) ties to the mythical twelfth-century context that informed other widely read accounts. For example, in retelling some of Álvares’ narrative, Leo Africanus’ Description of Africa (1550) casts Prester John as a “ciuil magistrate” rather than a priest (qtd. in Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 221). Nonetheless, it remained a touchstone in the history of the legend for it made clear that Prester John was not a person but an inherited title to refer to the Ethiopian negus, here Lebna Dengel (Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 21–22). The stories of Covilhã and Álvares influenced the notable Prester John narratives of Damião de Góis (1540), Richard Hakluyt (1589), Samuel Purchas (1613), and Samuel Johnson (1759).

At the opening of the sixteenth century, it seems that Álvares’ popular account of Prester John had already altered Europe’s relationship with the legendary figure. Specifically, the promise of a military alliance, a foundational theme of the legend, began to fade. This was not due to a lack of effort. In 1509, Queen Eleni, empress of the former emperor Zara Yaqob (r. 1434–1468) and regent of the young Lebna Dengel (r. 1507–1540), penned a letter to the Portuguese King Manuel I (r. 1495–1521) that allegedly reached the king in 1513 (Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 210–211). The letter, later collected in Damião de Góis’ Legatio (1532), acknowledged Portugal’s request for military aid and introduced an Armenian ambassador/envoy Matthew who would arrive in Portugal to confirm the support of the Ethiopian court. Matthew’s arrival, coupled with that of Álvares’ party, signaled to the Portuguese king that an alliance with Prester John was certain; the king expressed this sentiment in a 1521 letter to Pope Leo X (Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 263). The pope responded, suggesting the possibility of a “treaty” with Prester John. Meanwhile, the oft-mistreated Matthew arrived in Ethiopia and traveled to Goa to inform the viceroy of Portuguese India Afonso de Albuquerque of the Ethiopian emperor’s intentions. The hope of such an alliance had faded, however, as the European leaders Matthew met began to question his authority and background. As Beckingham summarizes, Matthew “had proved to be a heretic, not a Nestorian like Hugh of Jabala’s potentate, but an unrepentant Monophysite” (Beckingham, Reference Beckingham, Beckingham and Hamilton1996: 24). The Legatio, which follows the story of Matthew, describes these Christians (and thus the kingdom of Prester John) not as potential allies but as schismatic heretics in need of conversion (Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 299).

Accounts, imaginings, and echoes of an Ethiopian Prester John would trickle into European popular culture even into the twentieth century, but the widespread hope that a powerful African king would convert to Catholicism and provide aid to their European brethren had begun to diminish again, even among the Portuguese. The narrative framework of an Asian Prester John had even returned to vogue. As early as the fifteenth century, Pietro Ranzano’s Annales omnium temporum (1407–1450) discusses the author’s meeting with the aforementioned Pietro Rombulo, who had spent thirty-seven years at the Ethiopian court, and who himself identifies Prester John not with the negasti but with the rulers of China. Jesuits missionaries Benedict Goës (1605) and Fernão Guerreiro (1608) as well as Nicolão Godinho (1615) argued that overeager Portuguese missionaries had conflated the presence of Christians in Ethiopia with the kingdom of Prester John, though these men seem to make the same mistake in their travels to China, where they insist Prester John once lived. These sentiments are echoed in Manoel de Almeida’s The History of High Ethiopia or Abassia.Footnote ⁶³ And finally, in a narrative that serves as a fitting cap to this narrative path, Jerónimo Lobo, who spent nearly two decades in Ethiopia, argues, in A Short Relation of the River Nile (1669), that the association of Prester John with Ethiopia can be reduced to an unsound linguistic misattribution, discussed in the final narrative path section of this Element. Lobo avers that “there remains nothing at present in all the East, but the bare Names of the Fields, in wyhich this Celebrated Cathay Stodd, and its Emperor Prester John reignd” (qtd. in Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 283). Echoing the failures of the Italians and Portuguese to establish a military partnership with the Ethiopian sovereign, Prester John, Lobo insists, was a long-dead king in Asia.

The Genealogy of a Title

It did not take long for a narrative path to emerge that categorized Prester John no longer as indorum rex,Footnote ⁷⁴ but as a title to be passed down, whether Keeper of the Grail, a designated line of Eastern kings, or the temporal ruler of Indian Christians. This tradition begins with the early thirteenth-century Parzival. In the text’s last chapter, Wolfram writes that after Grail bearer Repanse de Schoye “gave birth … in India, to a son, who was called Johan,” she and Feirefiz decided to call him Prester John, and “forever they retained that name for the kings there” (Eschenbach, Reference Eschenbach and Edwards2006: 344–345). Brewer refers to this moment as a “conceptual transition” that creates space for Prester John as both man and title, a tradition continued in Younger Titurel (Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 22). Meanwhile, the King David story that began to circulate around the time of the Fifth Crusade also tried to preserve the legend by turning its hero into a title. Jacques de Vitry’s “Second Letter from Acre” (1217) discusses the “Christians of the land of Prester John” as likely allies in the fight against Islam, yet when it comes to identifying this Prester John, Jacques introduces another name: King David. Either the son or grandson of Prester John, this figure was nonetheless himself “commonly called Prester John” (qtd. in Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 99). Prester John here becomes less an official title than an informal moniker attached to a line of mysterious Eastern kings.

Although written 150 years after the first two texts to disembody Prester John, John of Hildesheim’s Historia trium regum (c. 1375) also turns Prester John into an inheritable title. This text provided a backstory to better explain Otto of Freising’s mid twelfth-century connection between the biblical magi and Prester John. Hildesheim notes that Indian Christians are governed by a “patryarke Thomas” though above him sits a ruler styled in the rex et sacerdos model Hildesheim uses the Magi to establish. Since “there is no degree so hygh as preesthode” and “in worship of saynt Johan theuangelyst [the evangelist]” Hildesheim concludes that “this lorde sholde not be called a kynge or emperour, but he sholde be called Preter Johan” (qtd. in Brewer, Reference Brewer2015, 209). It is no coincidence that several writers that follow in this section mention something of this fact, including Philippe Avril, one of the first writers to identify Prester John with the Dalai Lama.

The Etymology of a Title

The metamorphosis of Prester John from a mortal king into an inherited title led the legend’s skeptics to a variety of conclusions. Such skeptics frequently blamed the mission of Pêro da Covilhã for a linguistic error that led a host of later missionaries to misidentify several Ethiopian negasti as Prester John. Over two centuries, a dozen other writers speculated on the linguistic and etymological roots of such an association in accounts that were as creative as they were convoluted.

Manoel de Almeida’s unpublished The History of High Ethiopia or Abassia (1628–1646) begins with a chapter called “The Name Prester John,” which inaugurates the inaccurate claim that Covilhã was the first to wrongfully associate Prester John with the Ethiopian sovereign. According to Almeida, the name Prester John was initially given to a Nestorian Christian ruler located in the interior of Asia. This man was so called because he always carried a cross and because his actual title, Jonanam (from the prophet Jonah), sounded like John (Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 320). Almeida’s unpublished text was not in itself influential, but the inclusion of this account in Balthazar Téllez’s Travels of the Jesuits in Ethiopia (1660) rendered it authoritative. For Téllez, the Ethiopian kingdom of “vulgarly call’d Prester John’s country” was written about “so variously, and with such unintelligible confusion” that it created a “Gordian knot” that scholars must attempt to untie (qtd. in Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 241). Téllez attests that no Jesuit travelers to Ethiopia, men who have now traversed the country “End to End,” had encountered a man who recognized the name or title. Téllez blames Covilhã for perpetuating the misunderstanding that Prester John was in Africa. When this news reached Portugal in his letters and in subsequent accounts such as Francisco Álvares’ tract, Covilhã’s attribution was accepted, as “pleasing News is rather believ’d than examind” (Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 241). Others, including Jerónimo Lobo, championed Pedro Paez’s argument in his History of Ethiopia (1620) that Covilhã’s mistake was to misunderstand “John” as “zan,” a traditional signifier of leadership positions in Ethiopia.Footnote ⁷⁵

Another group of skeptics omit the scapegoat Covilhã but still pursued linguistic explanations of this misidentification, likewise concluding that Prester John was in fact a long-dead Asian monarch. In the anonymous Embassy of David, King of Ethiopia (1533), it is suggested that the Ethiopian negus “is not called by them Prester John (as the masses falsely believe) but Gyam, which in their language means ‘powerful’ for he is in truth most powerful” (qtd. in Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 318). For Damião de Góis (1540), who had consulted with Saga Za Ab, an Ethiopian ambassador who traveled back to Portugal with Francisco Álvares in 1527, the correct title was “Pretiosus Iohannes” roughly derived from the Ge’ez title “Jan Belul,” belul meaning precious or exalted (Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 320). A number of subsequent writers found this to be the authoritative etymological accounting.Footnote ⁷⁶ Manoel de Almeida, however, claimed that Saga Za Ab had purposefully misinformed Damião, only telling the patriotic philosopher what he wanted to hear (Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 320).

Later writers, often without consulting any new or independent sources, offer other explanations. Peter Heylyn (1652) tries to prove that Prester John was a minor Asian ruler by working convolutedly through the linguistics of the corrupted translation that turned Marco Polo’s Nestorian shepherd into Prester John. For Philippe Avril (1693), Prester John was a “corruption of Preste-Arkan, that is to say, the king of Adorers” (qtd. in Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 255). The Benedictine monk and Hebraist Pierre Guarin reasons in his Chaldaica Grammatica (1726) that the correct title, “Prester Cohan,” reflects the Hebrew and Syriac words for “priest,” while his location in southern India – which Guarin places in Africa – means Prester Cohan’s subjects could be rightly called both “Indians” and “Abyssinians” (Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 296). For James Bruce (1790), it was the call “Rete O Jan hoi!, which, repeated quick, very much resembles Prete Jianni” (Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 298).

As with most of the legend’s narrative paths, the accounts of a misheard title end in much the same way they begin. Visiting Ethiopia in 1752, nearly 400 years after Europeans began visiting Ethiopia to seek Prester John, Remedius Prutký inquired about the association between the Ethiopian negus and Prester John, an idea still clearly circulating within Europe. Prutký claims in his Travels that the 28-year-old Emperor Iyasu II (r. 1730–1755) “was astonished” and claimed that “kings of Abyssinia had never been accustomed to call themselves by this name” (Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 264). Prester John had still not yet been found.

The Road to Tibet

Beginning in the seventeenth century, writers who we might call the “late optimists” reasoned that if Prester John was not in Ethiopia, he may still be found elsewhere. Although Prester John had become a title, it was now clear that this title had never been properly understood; such writers deemed it then reasonable to return to “Greater India,” from where it was now agreed Prester John had come, and to seek other titled priest-kings. This search resulted, for some, in the identification of Tibet and the Dalai Lama as plausible avatars of Prester John and his kingdom.

Unsurprisingly, one of the earliest medieval mentions of Tibet can be found in a text that also treated the Prester John legend. Benjamin of Tudela (c. 1130–1174), who had recorded a story like that related in Otto of Freising’s chronicle, avers in that same text that Tibet, part of the wider Persian empire and the source of the world’s musk, could be found by journeying four days west from Samarkand, a landmark in the LOPJ (Adler, Reference Adler1907: 82, 151). Less than a century later, John of Plano Carpini (c. 1185–1252) refers to the land as “Burithabet”; William of Rubruck (c. 1220–1293) calls it “Tebec” (Dawson, Reference Dawson1980: 23, 142). Both authors claim that the inhabitants of this land are cannibals (Dawson, Reference Dawson1980: 23, 142). The Elyseus Narrative, one of the earliest Prester John narratives, attests that the terrestrial paradise could be found on the top of four mountains in India. It is to the Himalayas that a new generation of travelers began to imagine a community of Christians.

The first writer to explicitly locate Prester John in Tibet was Johannes Nieuhof (1618–1672), a Dutch traveler and member of the East India Company, marking a new era in the mercantile pursuit of Prester John. Nieuhof’s travels in China, recorded in Embassy from the East-India Company (1673), lead him to a discussion of the origin of the Prester John legend, which he situates in greater Asia but concedes that “in what Place he Rul’d, is not exactly known” (Nieuhof, Reference Nieuhof1669: 342, EEBO). He reasons that the title Prester John, however transliterated, could not apply to a Chinese ruler but could refer to a sovereign located beyond the great desert, “conterminate on the North and West unto the Empire of China” (p. 342). Citing his source as “the Arabick geographer,” he then postulates that upon a mountain distinguished by “such craggy and difficult sides, that none can ascend it” lies the kingdom of Prester John (p. 342). Given his association of this land with Gog and Magog, Nieuhof appears to imagine Tibet in the mold of the terrestrial paradise, the place the Elyseus Narrative had located atop four giant mountains in “Greater India.” Nieuhof surmises that, driven by fear, an ancient Christian community must have found a way up the mountains after fleeing the persecution of Roman emperors.

While Nieuhof’s account of a Tibetan Prester John relies on idiosyncratic logic, he was not the first to imagine such an identification. A few years earlier, the Dutch minister and schoolmaster Arnold Montanus, relying on intelligence from the East India Company, identified Prester John’s kingdom somewhat more ambiguously as west of Sichuan in his Atlas Chinesis (1671). A few years before that, the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata (1667) situated Prester John in the kingdom of “Tanchut,” a province proximal to Tibet. The Portuguese humanist historian and poet Manuel de Faria e Sousa (1590–1649) identifies Prester John with Ethiopia but later asserts in his Asia Portuguesa (1667) that the priest-king may hail from Tibet.

Though the association between Prester John and Tibet was gradual, these texts illustrate that there were a variety of entry points: the East India Company, Portuguese humanism, and the continued missionary activity of the Jesuits and Capuchins.Footnote ⁷⁷ The most pronounced influence came from the last of these. Jesuits and Capuchins arrived in Tibet within two years of each other (1721, 1719), and a chapel was built and presided over by the latter, beginning in 1726. Yet there had already been rumors circulating among the Jesuits that Christians were to be found in Tibet. Very few of these travelers wrote of Prester John explicitly, however. Among those Jesuits who did was the aforementioned Philippe Avril, a French professor-turned-traveler dispatched to China who, like fellow missionary Jordanus of Sévérac, never reached his destination. In fact, Avril failed to reach his destination three separate times. Nonetheless, and like Jordanus, his journey brought to his mind a new home for Prester John. His account, though seemingly aberrant when first encountered, makes sense as the culmination of a slowly building new home for the title of Prester John.

Before further embellishing the association between Prester John and Tibet, Avril reviews the claims of Damião de Góis, Nicolão Godinho, and Balthazar Téllez. In his Travels into Diverse Parts of Europe and Asia (1692), Avril flatly affirms, “the Dalaè-lama is without all contradiction that same Famous Preste-Jean” (qtd. in Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 254). He further concludes, “In a word, since that Title, and whatever many Authors have said of him, can be attributed to no Person more justly then to this Dalae-Iama, ’tis more natural to acknowledge him in this Country of Asia, where he has always been, then [sic] to seek him out in Habyssinia [Ethiopia], where he never was” (p. 254). Although Avril gives the appearance that such intelligence gleaned was from his travels, which never approached Tibet, his reasoning is firmly grounded in the conversations about Prester John’s title and name that this section has already discussed. After making his pronouncement, Avril recapitulates the linguistic ideas from Covilhã through a half dozen other theories and concludes that the Dalai Lama was the only logical attribution. While this Prester John rules in a diminished role, Avril reassures “[h]owever it were, he is still in high veneration among all the Eastern people, who acknowledge him for the Head of their Religion” (p. 254). At the end of his treatment of the legend, Avril augments his Tibetan Prester John argument with one culminating linguistic link recalling a key feature of Prester John iconography: “And that which is farther remarkable is this, that he bears the Name of Lama, which in the Tartar Language signifies a Cross” (p. 254).

This identification did not die with Avril after his shipwreck in 1698. That very year, the Royal Society fellow and writer Jodocus Crull (1660–1713) favorably repeated Avril’s argument in The Antient and Present State of Muscovy. The English clergyman Thomas Broughton (1704–1774) simply tells his reader to “see Dalai-Lama” under the “Prester John” heading within his Historical Dictionary of All Religions (1742).

Finally, in the German geographer Johann Gottlieb Georgi’s Russia (1780), this narrative loop is closed. Writing 100 years after Avril, Georgi, who spent much of his life traveling through Siberia and Russia, once more reviews the linguistic history of Prester John’s title. From this he reasons, “[n]ow, if we can admit that the missionaries of the Nestorians came into these countries … then the Nestorian patriarch and Prester John are one person … according to the rules of etymology” (qtd. in Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 268). Georgi also links Prester John to the Dalai Lama, whom he correctly locates at the Potala palace in Lhasa; he even provides approximate geographic coordinates. At the end of his discussion, he brings the Prester John of Otto of Freising together with that of Philippe Avril: “In the pursuit of these enquiries we shall find this Prester John, or this Nestorian Catholicus, to be likewise one and the same with the Dalai Lama” (p. 268). From the twelfth to the eighteenth century, travelers and writers continued to shrink the unknown world using the legend of Prester John to collapse diverse cultures and personages into the familiar figure of Prester John.

Prester John in Black and White

By the definition just given, Prester John’s racial identity is complicated. On the one hand, he has been rendered to appear as everything from an Anglo European to a Southeast Asian to a black African to a white Ethiopian. On the other hand, fewer than one-fifth of Prester John narratives mention Prester John’s appearance, let alone his perceived race. When assessing these depictions chronologically, no obvious patterns emerge. To further complicate matters, the question of Prester John’s race cannot be completely divorced from his purported function. The idea of Prester John, like the medieval concept of race itself, is a cultural production that, following Heng, “selectively essentializes” perceived cultural differences to manage the larger project of human difference (Heng, Reference Heng2018: 27). Insofar as race “is a response to ambiguity,” as Heng proposes, Prester John’s racial identity warrants analysis even as it remains amorphous.

In other words, it is challenging to disentangle the priest-king’s racial identity from the sense of sameness or difference he represented to those who imagined him: a messianic white hero portending a universal Christendom, a powerful black warrior-heretic ripe for potential conversion, the exotic Indian ruler who oversees a potential trove of undiscovered riches, a faceless gesture toward a utopic otherworld, or, as we shall see, a dangerous African rebel attempting to overthrow European colonial rule. What can be clearly concluded is that Prester John’s imagined race both influenced and was influenced by the ideological commitments of the legend’s writers, even as Prester John lacked any stable racial referents within and across narrative paths.

The evidence concerning Prester John’s racial makeup focuses on skin color, which is a component for medieval and early modern racial thinking but was not necessarily itself racially determinative (Snowden, Reference Snowden1983: 63–86; Stoler, Reference Stoler1997; Patton, Reference Patton and Patton2015). His racial identity is, at the end of the day, unsettled. Another, more provocative way of framing the discussion is to suggest that Prester John is transracial, or contextually raced. It would be irresponsible to speculate upon what this means for larger medieval and early modern conversations about race, but such malleability does suggest something mutable and therefore extra-biological about medieval and early modern racial identity.

It is useful to begin by identifying the parts of Prester John’s biography that helped writers imagine his race. Foremost among these is John’s descendancy from the Magi who, in addition to hailing from separate places themselves, are racialized variously in extrabiblical narratives (Sim, Reference Sim1999).Footnote ⁸¹ Another key feature of Prester John’s identity is his adherence to non-doctrinal Christianity, usually as a so-called Nestorian Christian. In Prester John narratives, Nestorians are commonly identified as a “people,” but the persistent medieval association between this Christian practice and Islam testifies to the degree to which, in Heng’s words, such writers participated in the practice of “racing Nestorian Christians” (Heng, Reference Heng2018: 316).Footnote ⁸² Heng argues that “heretical Christians” in general, and Assyrian (Nestorian) Christians in particular, should be considered a kind of “virtual race” in the Middle Ages due to the way they were institutionally “set apart by absolute and fundamental differences” from Catholicism (pp. 316–323). The racial overtones of Nestorianism forced some writers to drop this association with Prester John to maintain the figure’s racial mutability. Historia trium regum (c. 1375), for example, links only Jaspar, one of the Magi, to Nestorianism, condemning his “Nestorini” people as “the worste and the cursedest heretykes of the worlde, and for the moost parte they ben blacke ethyopyes” (qtd. in Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 209). In this example, the descriptors “Nestorini,” “heretykes,” “blacke,” and “ethyopes” serve as out-groups for the writer and, when compounded, present the prejudicial visual spectacle of Prester John’s antithesis. John of Hildesheim’s Prester John, on the other hand, is neither Nestorian heretic nor black Ethiopian, and such a description of Jaspar’s progeny may serve to capture and set aside the Prester John associations Hildesheim wished to ignore in his own vision of the priest-king. For Hildesheim, these Nestorians “forsoke” Prester John. Prester John here remains unraced, which, put another way, maintains his racial availability.

Other early associations presented more specific versions of Prester John. In Parzival, he is the son of the bicultural Feirefiz, whose racial inheritance is manifest in his mottled black and white skin. Meanwhile, in the same decade, the prophesied arrival of a Christian savior during the Fifth Crusade, premised on deeds by Chinese and Mongol warriors, was represented as some nearer-west bearer of the familiar biblical names of John and David.

Not surprisingly, it is in the Ethiopian Prester John path that the writers truly begin to attend to Prester John’s imagined or reported appearance. In the early years of Prester John’s imagined residence in Africa, two key features were commonly mentioned: his blackness and a close relationship with the Cross. This understanding of an African Christian king predates Prester John’s association with Ethiopia. Before Prester John’s name resurfaced at the time of the Fifth Crusade, the crusader and chronicler Robert of Clari (c. 1216) described the arrival in Constantinople of a Nubian king, a black man with “a cross in the middle of his forehead that had been made with a hot iron” (Clari, Reference Clari and McNeal2005: 79), an image repeated by Marco Polo (qtd. in Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 131) and Samuel Purchas (qtd. in Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 236), among other authors of Prester John narratives. Friar Jordanus’ Mirabilia (1340) does not describe Prester John himself but identifies the people of the empire of “Abdeselib” over which he reigns as black “as to their skins” and states that these people “burn the sign of the cross with fire in recognition of baptism” (qtd. in Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 168). This insistence on an embodied Christianity strengthens the in-group ties of these black Africans, who, as potential allies, are generally described positively. Jordanus adds, for instance, that these black Ethiopians and Nubians are “still men of intelligence with good brains, and they have understanding and knowledge” (p. 168). A similar sentiment is echoed in The Book of Knowledge of All Kingdoms, in which the presumably fictional traveler-narrator states that Prester John’s subjects are “black as pitch” and “are men of good understanding, and good mind” (Marino, Reference Marino1999: 60–61). John of Marignolli (1330) distinguishes Prester John’s Ethiopia only in that it is inhabited by black people. Mandeville’s Ethiopians, inhabitants of the Torrid Zone, were black and lived shorter lives due to the climate. Jacob of Verona too mentions the “black Ethiopians” (qtd. in Salvadore, Reference Salvadore2016: 5). On Carignano’s map they are “Christiani negri.”

Later in the Prester John as African monarch path, Prester John’s skin color becomes considered more carefully to establish in-group ties with the writers. Bertrandon de la Broquière (1457) tells a secondhand story of a man who claims to have been married in the Ethiopian kingdom of Prester John, a land peopled with Christians “neither white or black … but yellow-brown” (qtd. in Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 214). In Francisco Álvares’ account (1540) of his time in Ethiopia (1520–1526), Emperor Lebna Dengel, understood to be Prester John, is “a young man, not very black” with a complexion he describes as “chestnut and bay,” which is again emphasized as a “not very dark color” (qtd. in Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 248).

As news from Portuguese missionaries searching for Prester John returned to Europe, the Ethiopian Prester John began to more and more resemble the writers who imagined him. As early as 1499, Giuliano Dati’s The Great Magnificence of Prester John, categorized above as a literary text, was also published with a frontispiece depicting a white European Prester John. Johann Boemus’ encyclopedic ethnography Omnium gentium mores, legus, et ritus (1520) and its 1555 English retelling, Fardle of Facions, both further Europeanize Prester John, stating, in the narrative of the latter, that he was “not as the moste of the Ethiopians are, blacke, but white” (qtd. in Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 287). Francisco Álvares’ publisher Luis Rodrigues also diminishes Prester John’s blackness, depicting him on this frontispiece (1540) as a white, European-looking bearded man dressed in armor atop a horse. These examples of whitewashing Prester John did not necessarily impact Europe’s larger view of Ethiopia and its inhabitants. In 1557, for example, the Spanish Jesuit missionary and future Latin Patriarch of Ethiopia André de Oviedo affirmed that Lebna Dengel’s son and successor Galawdewos was “a broad black man” (qtd. in Silverberg, Reference Silverberg1972: 303). But on the Mercator maps that featured Prester John (1569, 1628) the African king Prester John looked no different than the king of France.

As the linguists began to disentangle the title of Prester John away from the sovereignty of Ethiopia, those who continued to insist on his African residence returned to portrayals of the priest-king as a black man. Representative of this transition was a map contained in Peter Heylyn’s Cosmographie (1652). Although its creator Nicolas Visscher had returned Prester John to Asia, he featured the king of Abyssinia in the upper-left border of his New, Plaine, and Exact Map of Africa (1652) as a young black man wearing a European-style crown. For Remedius Prutký, the very title Prester John is etymologically linked to the blackness of his people. He argues (1752) that the title “Prete Ianni” is a corruption of “preto,” the Portuguese word for black (Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 265). Proposing a similar etymological error, Jerónimo Lobo analogizes that the Europeans understood Ethiopian kings as Prester John in a similar manner to Muslims who came to use the term “Franks” to refer to “all white men” (Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 247). For Voltaire (1756), Prester John had become fully out-grouped as “that black prince who is half schismatic Christian and half Jew” (qtd. in Brewer, Reference Brewer2015: 266). At the end of the eighteenth century, James Bruce reduces a no longer useful Prester John to black chieftain of a primitive land.

On closer inspection, the outlines of a larger pattern come into view. A strictly chronological accounting of racial descriptors in Prester John narratives suggests that Prester John’s race was grounded entirely in a writer’s contextualized expectations for his function, but if we look at these depictions within each narrative path, there is a tendency for Prester John to become “whiter” and more “European” over time. Put another way, at the highest points of enthusiasm for a given narrative path, that is, the beginnings, it was exceedingly rare for writers to describe or depict Prester John as white or European in bearing, even if they focus on the in-group status of his Christianity. The Europeanizing of Prester John tends to coincide with points where belief in that version of Prester John begins to diminish. Although there do not exist enough racialized descriptions of Prester John to stake any definitive claims, a brief survey of his racial history across narrative paths aligns with a mutability that echoes findings of scholarship on medieval race.

Space does not here afford a full treatment of the races of Prester John and the ideologies that underpin that discussion, but I want to end on a brief discussion of two texts, both from the twentieth century, that feature Prester John and use his race, I would argue, to make specific arguments about the legend and what this fictional priest-king represents for modernity.

Prester John in Color

The first of these two texts is a 1910 novel called Prester John, written by the Scottish novelist, historian, and politician John Buchan. This purported adventure story for boys tells the tale of Reverend John Laputa, a South African (here called “Kaffir”) man who styles himself a new Prester John and attempts to unite South Africa against British imperialism. This was the first of Buchan’s books to gain wide popularity and was made into a silent film in 1920, shot and produced in South Africa.

The book opens on the Scottish seaside with the main character David Crawfurd as a boy observing a strange midnight ritual led by the town’s eloquent black minister, the Reverend John Laputa. After his father’s passing, Crawfurd moves to South Africa to take up a shopkeeping post outside of a Zulu village in South Africa. On the voyage over, Crawfurd notices that same Reverend from his childhood and observes him conversing most nefariously with a Portuguese man of suspicious repute.

Once arrived and settled, Crawfurd feels uneasy in the arid plains of South Africa. As time passes, he finds himself on the inside of the illegal diamond trade. What’s more, he comes to learn that the Reverend who seems to be “haunting” him is, in fact, the leader of a proposed uprising of the Zulu and Swazi peoples, and thus the central figure in an attempt to retake Africa from British imperial power. Reverend John has proven to be a leader who has garnered both sacred and secular authority from the local South African tribes. We learn that this Reverend also calls himself Prester John – who is speculated upon by Blaauwildebeestefontein’s European schoolmaster Mr. Wardlaw as “a sort of Christian, but I expect that his practices were as pagan as his neighbours” (Buchan, Reference Buchan1910: 87).

An “adventure” unfolds in which David Crawfurd helps a seasoned British military officer capture Reverend Laputa and the ruby necklet that is the source of the priest-king’s power. An elegant physical symbol of the legend’s charisma, this necklet is first stolen by the conspicuously unlikeable Portuguese Henrique, stolen back by Laputa, and then finally recaptured and squandered in a ravine by the novel’s young Scottish hero. Separated from this necklet, Prester John is rendered useless. Faced with the imminent arrival of colonial authorities, the anti-colonialist leader leaps to his presumed death into an underground river chasm. His final words, as Uebel records, are “my race is doomed” (Uebel, Reference 76Uebel and Cohen2001: 276; Buchan, Reference Buchan1910: 218). Buchan’s colonialist vantage, echoed in his antagonist’s demise, frames the possibility of African independence as dependent on magic and marvel, some trick required to overcome a perceived racial disadvantage. “If he had been born white, he might have been a second Napoleon,” the Colonial Army Captain James Arcoll muses (Buchan, Reference Buchan1910: 88).

In Buchan’s Prester John, the once-fabled medieval priest-king who promised a Christian unification of the globe becomes the anti-colonialist villain in an adventure story for boys. Buchan seemed to think he found Prester John not as a figure to usher in a Christian universalism but as a specter portending a postcolonial future. While that medieval promise of universal Christendom depended on a hopeful reconciliation with the fluidity of cultural difference so central to the myth as depicted in the LOPJ, the structural failure of Buchan’s Prester John seems to assert that, in an imperial modernity, cultural – here rendered racial – identity proves rigid and inflexible, and that the act of translatio across boundaries that was so essential to the LOPJ’s early transmission, in this twentieth-century context, becomes impossible.

Prester John as Superhero

Prester John resurfaces in the 1960s, during which he became a character in the ever-popular Marvel comic book series, a narrative universe that now boasts the highest-grossing film franchise of all time, having generated nearly 30 billion dollars globally. In an issue of The Fantastic Four (1966), the gang visits the Black Panther, introduced as “the hereditary chieftain of the mighty Wakandas … whose wealth is virtually beyond calculation” (Lee, Reference Lee1966: 4). While touring Wakanda, Johnny Storm – alias “The Human Torch” – expresses his melancholy to friend Wyatt Wingfoot about having lost his girlfriend Crystal to an impossible-to-reach area of Earth known as the “Hidden Land.” Lucky for Johnny, the ever-hospitable Black Panther lends the heroes a futuristic all-terrain vehicle capable of transporting them to that otherwise unreachable place. On the way, the domed vehicle becomes trapped in quicksand, releasing the duo into a cave-like chasm where they stumble upon none other than Prester John, asleep on a throne. Having been identified in nearly every corner of the globe by the 1960s, the comic introduces its newest superhero in one of the few places where he had not yet been sought: underground. But just as Prester John begins to narrate his backstory, the action of the issue resumes and the reader is left with no further information.

Nearly a decade later, Prester John is reintroduced when Marvel mainstays The Thing and Iron Man accidentally launch themselves deep into the ground (Mantlo, Reference Mantlo1975). Once again, Marvel heroes encounter Prester John in his underground kingdom. Looking closely at the issue’s inaugural visual presentation of Prester John, one can see that the priest-king is depicted holding the very ruby necklet that sources his charisma and power in John Buchan’s Reference Buchan1910 novel (Mantlo, Reference Mantlo1975: 11). Upon this observation, the priest-king’s underground kingdom accretes another layer of significance. As mentioned, Buchan’s novel ends with the Reverend John jumping to his presumed death into a cave. And yet, here, in 1975, these two Marvel superheroes find Prester John alive and well, hundreds of feet underground, equipped with his “power stone,” no worse for the wear. Only one thing has changed: Prester John transforms from a black man dressed in traditional Zulu clothing into a red-headed Anglo man dressed like he had just returned from a crusade.

Returning to the history he began in the 1966 comic, this Prester John relates that he was indeed a crusader-knight, protector of Richard I “the lion-hearted,” folk-hero of the Third Crusade. What’s more, Prester John is also the self-described “son of Avalon,” where he was frozen, much like the mythical English King Arthur, a “hidden king,” here positioned on a futuristic device called the “seat of survival” designed by the alchemists of Avalon, in which he can remain in suspended animation until his services are once again needed (Mantlo, Reference Mantlo1975: 14–15).

But whom does Prester John serve? What these texts make clear is that Prester John serves no man or woman. Prester John has since been featured in 19 separate Marvel titles and more than 100 issues from 1966 to 2010, and in none of these does he make a formal alliance with another character or betray obedience or allegiance to a larger force. The self-described “master of all” and “creation and the power in the universe” (Mantlo, Reference Mantlo1975: 22) remains alive, but dormant, most recently appearing in 2010. Perhaps the more abiding question then is where does Prester John serve? As these twenty-first-century narratives validate, Prester John continued to inhabit the frontiers of a cultural imagination attempting to domesticate the wildness of the world within the mythological frameworks that had helped create the desire for the very concept of wildness. But fitting the pattern established in earlier narrative paths, Prester John has transformed from a black man into a white one to do so.

Waiting for Prester John

Even if the legend has been written out of history books, Prester John remains alive in popular culture, whether we knew he was there or not. These two texts provide a final example of the narrative actions of malleability and elasticity so central to understanding the longevity of the Prester John legend. Prester John maintained this narrative flexibility despite the legend’s continual, elastic return to one or more of the foundational themes established during the medieval genesis of the legend: Latin Christendom’s perceived need for external assistance against foreign threats, the receipt of a future-directed pledge of military aid, the attempts to enclose ideological threats within a Christian framework, and the desire for the unknown parts of the world to be revealed as an extension of what was already familiar.

Long confined to the periphery of medieval studies – not quite a literary figure, not quite a historical personage or theological event – a wider narrative history of the legend of Prester John reveals the degree to which this eminently mutable signifier figured quite centrally in the project of European modernity and, with it, a globally interconnected understanding of culture and identity. The legend’s medieval European intellectual framework not only influenced Europe’s movement into a so-called globalized modernity but also survived within those modern structures the legend helped influence. Whether one marks Europe’s entry into the modern world by the facilitation of global trade networks, the project of colonialism, the cultural emergence of racial discourse, the movement away from Aristotle and natural philosophy toward scientific empiricism due to a newfound access to lost texts, or the rise of the nation-state out of a vision of sovereignty, Prester John was there: on maps and frontispieces, a point of translinguistic contact, connecting an old world with a new one, a rhetorical model, scribbled in the margins, dog-eared and dreamed of.