they hear about him? Few dared say no.
Marco Polo had embellished the legend in a rather discouraging way, by declaring that Prester John was long since dead, killed by the Mongol leader Chinghiz Khan in ‘one of the greatest battles ever seen’. The Prester himself had been a Mongol, albeit a Christian, and Marco turned him into a somewhat unpleasant figure whose arrogance led to his own downfall; when Chinghiz had politely asked for his daughter as a bride, Prester John replied fiercely that he would rather ‘commit his daughter to the flames’. That had led to the disastrous war. The descendant of Prester John was a king named George, a mere vassal of the Great Khan.
Even if Marco’s account was highly confused, there was a certain historical basis for it, because back in 1141 an immense battle had indeed been fought in the Katwan valley near Samarkand between the followers of a nomad from north China named Yelu Dashi and the army of Sanjur, a Muslim sultan; the opposing sides were reputed to have thrown a total of 400,000 horsemen into the field, and when Yelu Dashi emerged triumphant he went on to capture Samarkand. Although not a Christian, he was supported by the heretical Nestorians and was sympathetic towards them (even calling one of his sons by the suitably warlike name of Elijah). It is likely that Nestorian merchants had brought news of Yelu Dashi’s victory westwards to the Levant, since it was only three years later that Bishop Hugh of Jabala had travelled to Rome and told there how a great victory had been won ‘in the uttermost East’ by a Christian king named John.
If by the start of the fourteenth century Marco Polo had declared Prester John to be dead – and by any rational judgement, he had to be – the time might seem to have arrived for Europe to stop believing in him. On the contrary, his fame was fanned into new life by ‘Sir John Mandeville’, an imaginary English knight whose fictitious memoirs claimed to be an account of thirty-four years spent travelling in the East.
Who wrote the Mandeville text remains an enigma, but it was someone with a talent close to genius. He was possibly an Englishman born in St Albans, north of London, who in about 1350 had fled across the Channel to Liège – another cathedral city – after committing some grave crime. Perhaps he was a dealer in precious stones, for his narrative reveals a compulsive interest in diamonds. His 70,000-word tour de force was written in French a few years before he died in 1372. At his deathbed was a Liège lawyer and fellow-writer, Jean d’Outremeuse, who has sometimes been wrongly named as Mandeville’s creator.
The surname of the fictitious Sir John could have been derived from William de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, a twelfth-century crusader who sailed from England to the Holy Land with a fleet of thirty-seven ships. (While on this expedition he had helped the Portuguese to fight against the Muslims in a battle during which 40,000 men were killed.) But the stratagems by which the Mandeville author hid his own identity scarcely matter beside the impact of his work on all levels of European society for several centuries. He was not recognized for what he was – a brilliant confidence-trickster who had pillaged the memoirs of many real travellers, Marco Polo among them – but was revered as a trustworthy witness to the world’s wonders.
Mandeville’s Travels was destined to be the first book ever printed in Europe in a language other than Latin, when a Dutch version came out in 1470; by 1500 at least twenty-five editions had appeared. Part of the narrative’s success derived from its grotesque stories, sometimes with a sexual element; even the familiar Roman and medieval tales of lands where husbands invite other men to lie with their wives are worked over once more. This was the kind of earthy secular writing which the Church condemned yet never quite managed to outlaw. The author knew how to forestall religious criticism: as the climax of his story, readers are introduced to the country of Prester John, most virtuous of Christian monarchs.
The writer of the original Prester John letter had motives easy to understand. He wanted to tell the beleaguered Christians of Europe that they were not alone, that succour might be at hand. The motives of whoever called himself Sir John Mandeville are more intriguing, for there was small prospect of financial reward. Perhaps he was merely an ‘armchair traveller’, amusing himself in his last days by drawing together the favourite tales of a lifetime’s reading. Indeed, his closing sentences are distinctly plaintive, talking of ‘rheumatic gouts’ and of ‘taking comfort in wretched rest’. He ends by asking his readers to pray for him; then he will pray for them. If within the work there lies some religious or political motive, it is hard to discern across a gulf of six centuries.
Had he lived to see it, the Mandeville author would have marvelled at the huge and lasting success of his travelogue. One sure result was to sustain the Prester John myth in the minds of those European powers, and in particular, the Portuguese, who were looking for new routes to the Indian Ocean lands of pepper, spices and jewels. To find the priest-king would be a service to God, while acquiring earthly wealth. Thus a medieval legend was destined to buttress the needs of the Age of Discovery: even Columbus, crossing the Atlantic in search of Cipango (Japan) and the land of the Great Khan, had carefully studied Mandeville. It is unlikely, however, that Columbus really expected to meet Prester John, if only because Mandeville had moved the priest-king westwards from where Marco Polo had placed him to become the ‘great emperor of India’. Moreover, the name of the elusive monarch was no longer seen as belonging to an individual; that would strain gullibility too far.
So ‘Prester John’ became a title, for bestowal upon the ruler of any suitable Christian kingdom discovered in the East. The name was used in precisely such a way in the Mandeville story: ‘This emperor, Prester John, takes always to wife the daughter of the Great Khan; and the Great Khan also in the same wise the daughter of Prester John. For they two are the greatest lords under the firmament.’ (It demonstrates Europe’s ignorance of events in Asia that the writer seemed unaware that the Mongols, whose ruler was the ‘Great Khan’, had fallen from power almost a century before he was writing.)
As early as 1306, when the Mandeville author had yet to put pen to paper, one scholar had already pointed to Ethiopia as the kingdom of Prester John. It happened because of a remarkable visit to Europe by a thirty-strong Ethiopian delegation sent to the Pope and ‘the King of the Spains’ to seek help against the Muslims. Spain may have been chosen from all the European countries because there was an active Catalan trading station in Alexandria, as well as an Orthodox patriarch who traditionally appointed the head of the Ethiopian Church. If Spanish aid were forthcoming, said the Ethiopians, they were ready to join in a war against the infidels.
The mission apparently gained little, apart from expressions of friendship; but on their way home from Rome and Avignon, where they had been received by Pope Clement V, the Ethiopians were delayed in Genoa by bad weather. A learned priest, Giovanni da Carignano, took the chance to interrogate these strangers, whose looks were so unfamiliar. Being a cartographer, he was keen to learn all he could about the geography of Ethiopia, as well as its customs and religious rites. The Ethiopian king, according to Father Giovanni, was Prester John. Since the visitors would never have called their own king Prester John (his name was Wedem Ar’ad), the title must have been bestowed by Giovanni; since the Prester was by then regarded as being in India, and Ethiopia was commonly called Middle India, this was a reasonable assumption.
Another priest who decided to place the legendary Christian king in India was a Dominican named Jordanus, from the town of Sévérac in southern France. His life-story is obscure, but by his own account he made two hazardous journeys to the East in the early part of the fourteenth century and was granted the title by his religious order of ‘Bishop of Columbum in India the Greater’. (‘Greater India’ was probably seen by Jordanus as embracing South India, Sri Lanka and Thailand; Columbum was the port of Quilon, near Calicut.)
There were Christian communities in southern India, reputedly dating back to the time of St Thomas; the saint is said to have gone to India in A.D. 52 to spread the Gospel and eventually died there. Jordanus was being sent to cajole these wayward believers towards Roman orthodoxy, as well as to win new converts. All the evidence suggests that he made little headway; moreover, although the stories of Prester John and St Thomas had often become tangled together, the adventurous Dominican had been disappointed to find no trace at all of the Christian emperor in India the Greater.
The answer lay elsewhere, and on his return home Jordanus pointed confidently to Ethiopia. While not claiming