After the ill-fated siege of Damascus brought the Second Crusade to an end in abject failure for Christian forces, a curious letter arrived at the court of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Komnenos. It purported to be from a Christian king who called himself Presbyter Johannes, or John the Priest. Several aspects of this curious letter made it very interesting to the emperor, who would thereafter show it to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. You see, this priest king claimed to be the ruler of a vast kingdom, with numerous other kings in service to him, and his realm was beyond the reach of their Muslim enemies, at their rear as it were, in India. His kingdom was one of exotic wonders, grand wealth, and perfect justice. And as a devout Christian monarch, who in a show of humility had chosen to forego titles such as King and Emperor for the unassuming appellation of Priest, he might have proved to be just the ally they needed to defeat the Muslims besieging their Crusaders in the Holy Land. Indeed, the letter itself holds out hope of just such aid, when this Presbyter Johannes vows to defend Christians everywhere and to bring his armies to the Sepulchre of the Lord in order to “humble and defeat the enemies of the cross.” It is curious that such an offer would be addressed to Emperor Manuel Komnenos, as it’s thought he actually worked against the Crusaders’ latest efforts by encouraging Turks to attack them. And for numerous possible reasons, the emperor never attempted to reply to the letter. Some time later, Pope Alexander III made an effort to contact this Asian priest-king in the hopes of securing some kind of definite support. The Pope dispatched a messenger named Phillip with a reply letter, sending this emissary somewhere out into the mysterious regions they believed held the realm of this Presbyter John, or as he came to be known, Prester John. Whatever became of this missive and its messenger was never recorded.

The appearance of this manuscript in 1165 was not the beginning of this legend. Prester John did not emerge to leap fully formed off the page of this missive. Rather, some groundwork for the legend had been laid all the way back in the second century, with the apocryphal work The Acts of Thomas, which I discussed in some detail in a recent patron exclusive podcast episode. That work either originated or spread the tradition that after Christ’s ascension, the Apostle Thomas, he who had doubted Christ’s return until he was permitted to touch his wounds, spread Christianity in India. This tradition, as well as the story of the Magi from the Gospel of Matthew, whom it was said Thomas baptized during his subsequent travels, provided context for the Prester John letter. In fact, the letter makes direct reference to Thomas, Prester John mentions that he regularly dines with the bishops of his kingdom, among whom is the “Patriarch of St. Thomas,” and he describes his kingdom as extending “from farthest India, where the body of St. Thomas the Apostle rests, to the place where the sun rises, and returns by the slopes of the Babylonian desert near the tower of Babel.” The Prester John letter even refers to a specific passage of the apocryphal Acts of Thomas when it states that Prester John’s palace was built “in the image and likeness of the palace which the apostle Thomas planned for Gondoforus, king of the Indians.” This is indeed an odd claim, as it demonstrates only a passing familiarity with that work. The passage referred to actually has Thomas, who had introduced himself as a builder to the King of India, taking the king’s money to build him a palace but then turning around and giving the money to the poor. When the king asked where his palace was, Thomas said it had been built for him in heaven, prompting the king to throw Thomas in prison. But the Prester John letter is clearly not referring to a metaphorical palace built of good deeds. Rather, he mentions outbuildings and specific architectural elements and the materials out of which different parts had been built. Clearly the writer of the Prester John letter wanted to use the already dubious legends of St. Thomas’s acts in India to bolster the authenticity of the letter, but also doesn’t seem to have bothered to read up on his source material. The Acts of Thomas, however, was not his only source, it seems.

The Apostle Thomas in India, before being martyred by an Indian king. Public domain image.

Some 43 years before the appearance of the Prester John letter, 12th century sources indicate that a man who went by the name Johannes appeared in Constantinople. His language was strange, but a translator was eventually found who explained that this Johannes claimed to be a prelate from the shrine of St. Thomas—its Patriarch, in fact—who had come as a representative of the Christian Church in India seeking an audience with the Pope. Thereafter, he followed an embassy back to Rome and the Papal court, where he told tall tales of the capital of India, which he called Hulna, as a magical city with a river running through its center that deposited an endless supply of gold and gems on its banks, making the residents wealthy beyond imagining. This Johannes’s shrine was where St. Thomas’s body was supposedly preserved—the location that the Prester John letter would later use to mark the boundary of his kingdom—and every year on the saint’s feast day, he said they placed the red-headed corpse of St. Thomas on a chair, his cheeks still full of color and his hand outstretched to hold the eucharist wafers, which it was claimed the deceased saint would snatch away from the unworthy. This was the story told in an anonymous tract called De Adventu Patriarchae Indorum, or “On the Arrival of the Patriarch of the Indians,” and it could easily be dismissed as a fiction if it weren’t for the existence of independent corroboration of this visitor to Rome and his story, in the form of a letter by one Odo of Rheims, who claimed to have been present during this Johannes’s audience with the Pope. Of course, this only means the visitor existed and told his tale, not that the tale was true. If we attempt to check the story of this Patriarch Johannes, we would presume that his Hulna was actually the city of Khulna, in modern day Bangladesh, through which flow the Bhairab and Rupsa rivers. And in Khulna, there is indeed a Cathedral of St. Thomas, but it was not built until 1819 by the Bishop of Calcutta, an Englishman who we might presume was familiar with the story of Patriarch Johannes.

Certainly there is common ground between the wonders of Hulna described by this visitor to Rome and the wonders described in the Prester John letter. His kingdom, the letter claims, borders on Paradise, the Garden of Eden from which Adam was expelled, and contains also the fabled Mount Olympus, home of the Greek gods, though don’t try to reconcile this geographically with the mountain in Greece. Just as in Hulna there was said to be a river overflowing with gold and gemstones, so the Prester John letter describes a river called Ydonus that flows out of Paradise, carrying a rainbow of natural gems in its waters, including garnet, sardonyx, topaz, chrysolite, beryl, emerald, sapphire, amethyst, and onyx. It’s even said that children are raised to somehow survive for months underwater so that they can more easily collect these precious gems. Gold and silver too abound, and the letter frequently digresses to mention which parts of his palace are made of gold, and which carved of gemstone. For example, he describes how the palace is adorned with golden apples inlaid with garnet so that they shine both day and night. Prester John and his bishops dine on tables made of gold and of amethyst, and the king himself sleeps on a bed of sapphire, for it was thought that this gemstone banishes impure thoughts and thus encourages chastity. His is a land of milk and honey, seemingly literally, as he claims, “Our land flows with honey and abounds with milk,” and he tells of a magical spring flowing from Olympus, the taste of whose water changes hourly. This spring appears to be like the Fountain of Youth, for it is said that if one drinks from it after fasting, they will remain young and never grow infirm. Likewise, there is one gemstone that it’s said eagles carry into their land that can restore sight and even, when blessed and worn on the finger, makes its bearer invisible like Tolkien’s One Ring. Even in the uninhabitable regions of his kingdom, where there is found a sea of sand that moves as if it were water, in whose sandy waves swim strange fish, and a river of moving stones, still the letter claims there are great riches to be found, and if one were to snatch up a handful of that sand or flowing gravel, they would find it to be comprised wholly of gems and precious metals.

Detail of a 16th century chart featuring Prester John’s legendary Indian kingdom. Courtesy of The Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 — Detail of a 16th century chart featuring Prester John’s legendary Indian kingdom. Courtesy of
The Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

Some fantastical elements of the Prester John letter seem to have been influenced not by the tall tales told by the Patriarch Johannes of Hulna, but rather by a far older work, written sometime in the 3rd century CE or even as far back as the 2nd century, purporting to be a record of Alexander the Great’s exploits. This work, sometimes attributed to Alexander’s court historian Callisthenes though usually not since Callisthenes died before some of the episodes recorded in the account, is notable for its descriptions of the far East and India, which included a description of a menagerie of mythological beasts that haunted the imagination of readers for generations, including not only creatures that were unusual in the West, like elephants, camels and dromedaries, but also monstrous crabs, lions with three eyes, centaurs, unicorns, and the odontotyrannus, or “tooth-tyrant,” a horned monster so huge that it could eat an elephant. Among the strange races of men supposedly encountered by Alexander and described in this romance were giants, strap-legged men, headless men with faces on their torsos, and men with dog heads. Seeming to confirm these ancient legends, the 12th century Prester John letter mentions many races of wild and unusual men, one-eyed men, men with eyes in the front and back of their heads, men with horns, cyclopses, and giants, as well as a range of fantastical creatures. This menagerie included the elephants, camels, dromedaries, hippos, panthers, tigers, and wild oxen present in the Alexander Romance, and added crocodiles, lamas, hyenas, red lions, and white bears. Gone were the centaurs and unicorns, replaced in the Prester John letter by such mythological beasts as griffins, satyrs, fauns, and the phoenix. Famously, the Alexander romance describes two races of cannibalistic men from northern Asia called Gog and Magog, whom Alexander contained by sealing off a mountain pass with a massive wall. This legend appears to have sprung from a passage in the book of Revelations, which states that in the end times, Satan will rally the endless forces of the evil nations Gog and Magog to his cause. In the original Latin text of the Prester John letter, no mention is made of this legend, but later medieval versions of the text transform one passage about the Lost Tribes of Israel living beyond the aforementioned stone river into a passage about the cannibalistic nations of Gog and Magog, identifying the unclean and evil nations of Revelation with the Jews and thereby forging a long-lasting anti-Semitic theme.

While a literary tradition can be traced from the Prester John letter back to the Alexander Romance, and its inspiration might be found in the form of the strange visitor to the Papal court 43 years earlier, still more recent source material can be identified for the letter. About twenty-three years after the visit of Patriarch Johannes to Rome, and only twenty years prior to the appearance of the Prester John letter at the court of the Byzantine Emperor, another correspondence made the first use of the name Prester John. According to Otto von Freising, in his work De Daubus Civitatibus, or “On the Two Cities,” a bishop named Hugh who had taken up residence in a Syrian territory called Jabala that had been conquered by Crusaders, reported to Pope Eugenius III in 1145 that the Muslim foe in far Asia had recently suffered a humiliating defeat by the forces of a Christian king that he called Presbyter Johannes, rex et sacerdos, king and priest. According to this tale, this Asian priest-king was a direct descendant of the Magi, or one of the Magi, who supposedly followed a star to visit the Christ Child in Bethlehem. Like his ancestor, who had supposedly been baptized by the Apostle Thomas himself, this king was a devout Christian. He ruled a kingdom situated “beyond Persia and Armenia in the farthest East” and he had routed the “brother kings of the Persians and Medes, called the Samiards” in a resounding victory claimed in the name of Christianity. Indeed, this priest-king had intended to march all the way to the Holy Land to aid the Crusaders’ efforts there, and surely would have, if he had not encountered difficulty crossing the River Tigris. The report seems to give weight to the idea that a Prester John actually did exist. However, a close reading of Otto von Freising’s text indicates that it was perhaps not the Syrian bishop Hugh of Jabala who called this priest-king Presbyter Johannes, but rather, that the name was in common use, for when he reports the name, he writes, “as indeed they are accustomed to call him,” and this “they” may refer to those in the Papal court rather than those in the Syrian bishop Hugh’s town, Jabala, or those in the priest-king’s realm. So perhaps the name was applied in confusion with the “Patriarch Johannes” who had spread the news of Christianity in the East 23 years earlier and likely sparked something of an oral tradition or popular legend in the process. Then there is the possibility that the Syrian bishop who reported the victory of Presbyter Johannes had reasons for embellishing his tale. After all, he had also come to report that the fortress of Edessa had been overrun a year earlier by the Church’s Muslim enemies, and to plead for the Church to launch another Crusade in response. In that situation, surely he believed he could better convince the Pope to mount a new military expedition by suggesting that a legendary Christian kingdom would join its forces with theirs.

Otto of Freising, as depicted on a 13th-century stained glass window in the Cistercian Abbey of Heiligenkreuz, Austria. Public domain image.

While the existence of a Christian kingdom in the East may have been legendary, to imply that there was no factual basis for Hugh of Jabala’s claims that Muslim forces in the East had recently been defeated would be false. Historians of Prester John have pointed to the central Asian Mongolian empire of the Qara Khitai and their triumphant emperor Yelü Dashi as the source of the story recorded by Otto of Freising. The origins of this short-lived kingdom are traced back to China, after the fall of the Tang Dynasty, its realm divided by the Chinese Sung Dynasty and by Mongolian invaders from the north called Khitans, whose chief clan was named Yelü. These invaders seized Peking and established their own dynasty, the Liao Dynasty. However, their dynasty was soon conquered, and their emperor captured, by other northern invaders from Manchuria, the Jin. However, one prince of the Khitan, Yelü Dashi, refused to be ruled by the Jin and led a band of adventurers westward. This well-educated royal son proved to be an expert archer and horseman, and leading his band into Turkestan, he established a new empire that he called Qara Khitai, or Black Cathay, and he assumed the title of Gur Khan, or King of the World. In 1141, his Qara Khitai Empire went to war with a neighboring empire of Seljuk Turks, and in a grand battle near Samarkand, commanding an army of some 300,000 horsemen and outnumbering the Turks three to one, he won a decisive victory against a Muslim foe. It was word of this momentous battle that Otto of Freising seems to have been recording secondhand. The details appear garbled in more than one way, though. Rather than at a place called Ectaba, it was at a place called Qatwan. And the Muslim forces were not led by brothers called Samiard, but by a sultan named Sanjar and his nephew, Mahmud. As for the name, Johannes, if it had not been taken from the earlier encounter with the supposed Patriarch of the Shrine of St. Thomas at Hulna, some have suggested that the title Gur Khan, corrupted and Latinized, became Johannes. As for the Christianity of the figure and his kingdom, more must be said.

As it turns out, Christianity was thriving within the Qara Khitayan Empire that defeated the Muslim Turks at Qatwan in 1141. The Christianity practiced there, though, was considered Nestorian and thus rejected by the Western Church as heretical. Named after 5th century theologian Nestorius, Nestorian doctrine differed from orthodox doctrine in the particular way it viewed Christ’s nature as both human and divine. It seems rather complicated, but as I understand it, Nestorius saw the human Christ as separate from the divine Christ, a kind of indwelling of God akin to the duality of body and soul, whereas the orthodox viewed these natures as united in one person. After Nestorian doctrines were declared heretical in the ecumenical councils of Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451, some among his supporters moved eastward, to the Neo-Persian Sassanid Empire, and from there across Asia. Despite the legend of the Magi and the mission of the Apostle Thomas, this appears to be the beginning of Christianity’s spread in the Far East, and Nestorian Christianity was certainly present in the Qara Khitai Empire under Gur Khan Yelü Dashi, and indeed, many of the soldiers who fought under him against the Muslim Turks at Qatwan surely were Christian soldiers.

A depiction of Khitan horsemen in the 10th century. Public domain image.

However, to characterize the kingdom of Qara Khitai as Christian would be inaccurate. The Qara Khitai empire was exceedingly polyglot, a true multicultural melting pot, as the Gur Khan practiced religious tolerance in his kingdom. Thus there were indeed Christians, likely Nestorians, but there were also Manicheans, Buddhists, Confucianists, and yes, even Muslims. And Yelü Dashi was no Christian zealot bent on stamping out the infidel. In fact, based on his background and upbringing in China, he was likely a Buddhist himself. His war against the Seljuk Turks was not a religious one. Indeed, rather than planning to march his armies on to the Holy Land to aid his coreligionists, his military aspirations lay in China, where he desired most to retake the provinces stolen from his dynasty by the Jin. But the Gur Khan would never accomplish this goal. After his death, leadership passed to his wife as regent, then to his son, then his daughter before being taken from his family by his daughter’s father-in-law. Afterward, in the early years of the 13th century, the Qara Khitai empire would be overthrown by a rebel prince of the Naiman tribe called Kuchlug. This usurper was a Nestorian Christian, and once in power, he did away with Yelü Dashi’s policy of religious tolerance, demanding that Muslims convert. This has led some to suggest Kuchlug was really the inspiration of Prester John, but that doesn’t track, chronologically, since he didn’t even stage his revolt until half a century after the Prester John letter was written. Similar problems of timeline rule out other candidates, such as Toghrul, Khan of the Nestorian Keraite Turks and ally of Genghis Khan, who did not even come into power until he had killed his brothers years after the appearance of the Prester John letter. For any of these later candidates to work, one would need to challenge not only the dating of the Prester John letter but also the date recorded by Otto of Freising for when the account of Presbyter Johannes was given by Bishop Hugh of Jabala to the Pope.

Meanwhile, other scholars have looked not to Asia for a historical Prester John, but rather to Africa, for in the Middle Ages, at the time that the Prester John letter appeared, the word “India” as it was popularly used did not necessarily indicate any discrete region but rather suggested many vague and exotic faraway locales, for there were many Indias, or Indies. If one accepts this notion, then the African empire of Ethiopia fits the bill as Prester John’s kingdom rather well. Ethiopia, or Abyssinia as it was called by medieval Europeans, represents a kind of Wakanda archetype for the Middle Ages, a mystery nation about which little was known. While its geographical situation in Eastern Africa may not have been clearly understood, the West knew of Abyssinia as an island of Christianity, surrounded by Muslim territories. Indeed, this understanding was accurate. In the Book of Acts, the Apostle Philip is said to have converted an Ethiopian eunuch to Christianity, and tradition in Ethiopia credits its ancient Christianization to that eunuch, who came home and spread the word. What is known for a certainty is that sometime in the 4th century CE, an Ethiopian king became a Christian, and Christianity became the faith of the land. As Islam spread throughout Africa, this Christian kingdom found itself isolated from the rest of the Church and in constant conflict with its neighbors. Rumors only reached Christian Europe of this Christian stronghold in Africa through Ethiopian pilgrims who traveled to the Holy Land and spoke about their home. Marco Polo wrote in the 13th century that the Christian King of Abyssinia had sent an envoy to the Church of the Sepulchre in Jerusalem to make offerings on his behalf, and in the 14th century, these rumors solidified. Disparate reports began to refer to Abyssinia as the land of Prester John, and a Florentine who visited Egypt in 1384 declared that the sultan there lived in fear of Prester John, a Christian king to the south who controlled the Nile and could flood Cairo if the sultan did not pay him an annual tribute. One may protest that this king, living more than 200 years after the beginning of the legend, could not possibly be the Prester John that inspired the letter, but this theory actually suggests that Prester John was a corruption of a title held by every Christian monarch in Ethiopia. By the Middle Ages, Ethiopia was actually the only Christian nation to be ruled by priest-kings. Their monarchs served simultaneously as their chief priests. Moreover, their native word for “majesty” or “king” was Zān, pronounced much like the French would pronounce the name “Jean.” Thus through misunderstanding and mistranslation, perhaps, the name Prester John was born.

A 16th century map identifying Ethiopia as Prester John’s kingdom. Public domain image.

While both the Asian and the African hypothesis of the identity of Prester John provide some idea of the basis for the legend, neither really explain the authorship of the Prester John letter, for certainly it was not written by either a Mongolian Gurkhan or an Ethiopian Zān. It is universally accepted to have been a forgery or hoax, but who wrote it, and what was their intent? Clearly it was someone familiar with the legend of Prester John that was then circulating in Europe, or at least who knew of the report of Otto of Freising, leading some to suggest that it was a clergyman. A note on one later version of the letter claims it was first translated into Latin by Archbishop Christian of Mainz, leading some to hypothesize that he actually wrote it, rather than just translated it. However, linguistic analysis identifies some Greek words in the text, and some corruptions where its Latin translator had difficulty with Greek words, indicating it was originally written in Greek. This does little to help us identify who wrote the letter, but we might still speculate as to why it was composed. Due to its content, it has been suggested that it is a piece of utopian literature. Certainly passages make it clear how perfect the kingdom of Prester John is, even to an absurd degree. Not only is it a land of wealth and overabundance. There are also no scorpions, snakes or other venomous animals, and no poisons generally. Frogs don’t even croak to annoy Prester John’s happy subjects. They make their garments of a silk so strong that they must wash it in fire, and likewise, their buildings are roofed with an ebony wood that cannot be burned. And the table at which he dines has magical properties that prevent him and his guests from becoming intoxicated. His society is described as perfect in manifold ways; there is no poverty, no thievery, no greed, no flattery. Thus it certainly fits the mold of utopian literature. But determining what this utopian vision tells us about the author and the purpose of the work requires further analysis.

Utopian works typically convey some deeper message than just describing an impossibly perfect society. Usually they demonstrate the author’s worldview, an argument, as it were, that some concrete changes to the status quo should be made in order to become more perfect like the society being described. Hints at what the author of the Prester John letter believed should be changed come from the fact that the text is so insulting to the Byzantine Emperor. It insolently addresses him as a “Roman governor” and condescendingly offers him a place in Prester John’s household. If the letter writer thought so poorly of the Byzantine Emperor, perhaps the entire point of the letter was to criticize him, or more generally, all temporal or worldly powers. It was, after all, a time of conflict between the secular authority of emperors and the spiritual authority of the Church. Indeed, at the time that the letter was written, a schism had existed for years between the Papacy and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, who had supported a series of anti-Popes in opposition to Pope Alexander III. In this context, it’s not hard to see the letter, which extolls the virtues of a priest-king and his perfect society, as an allegory for the benefits of reconciling temporal and spiritual power by uniting them in one wise and godly figure. We may never know the true authorship of the Prester John letter, and we may always be left to speculate which Asian warlord or African potentate may have inspired the legend that served as its premise. Certainly, throughout the 13th and 14th centuries, explorers like Marco Polo were driven by myths of Eastern opulence and even specifically sought to find the legendary Prester John in Asia. And as late as 1521, the Portuguese dispatched emissaries to Ethiopia in hopes of winning the support of the mythic Prester John in their Mamluk Wars, finding that the storied Ethiopian Empire was itself nearly overrun by Somali Muslims. What we can know for certain, though, is that somewhere in the Byzantine Empire in the mid-12th century, perhaps in Constantinople, a dissident Christian, likely a priest, wrote a work of utopian fantasy that he hoped would teach the emperor, if not the world, that all Christian powers, temporal and spiritual, must unite to defeat the infidel and usher in an age of perfection… only to be frustrated when many missed the point and believe it to be an accurate description of an exotic paradise. Never underestimate the power of an audience to completely misapprehend the meaning of a work of art and in the process forge an immortal myth.

Until next time … remember… when you receive a letter out of the blue claiming to be from an African prince, all may not be as it seems…

The Epistle of Prester John

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