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by Axumezana » 02 May 2022, 21:00
It was inevitable that the search for Prester John should be shifted to Africa. By the early 14th century his kingdom was being located in Abyssinia, where a Christian community had been in existence since the fourth century. Contact between Abyssinia and Europe had been severed by the Islamic conquests of the seventh century; but at the very moment when the Asiatic Prester John was being discredited by travellers like Friar Odoric, Abyssinian embassies began to reach the courts of Europe and Dominican missionaries were able to penetrate into central Africa. By the end of the 14th century few writers in Europe would have denied that Prester John was the ruler of Abyssinia.
Here, it was argued, he had retired when the Mongols had defeated him in Central Asia. And here he was still able to render valuable assistance to Christendom against the power of Islam in the Mediterranean. In his kingdom lay the source of the River Nile upon which the life of the most formidable Muslim power, Egypt, depended, and he had but to divert the course of this river to starve the Egyptians into submission.
That Prester John had not already done so, some writers argued, was solely because the priest King did not wish to have on his conscience the lives of the many Christians who lived in the Nile Delta. Other observers, less charitably, wrote that the Prester was dissuaded by a large Egyptian subsidy.
In this new role the Priest King was stripped of much of the fabulous and romantic quality bestowed upon him by the earlier versions of the legend. Even now, however, he had a part to play in the history of exploration, for it was partly in search of his kingdom, in the hope that he would prove an ally in a renewed Crusade, that the Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator encouraged the series of journeys along the coast of West Africa which were to culminate in the epic voyage of Vasco da Gama and the discovery of the direct sea route to the Indies.
Prester John, Portuguese illustration.
Long after Prince Henry’s death this search continued, until, in 1493, the Portuguese traveller Covilham, who had been sent out by his king for this purpose, reached Abyssinia and ended, as far as Portugal was concerned, the quest for Prester John. But the Priest King, it now transpired, was neither very wealthy nor very powerful. Far from being a source of strength against Islam, he stood in great need of Portuguese support to save his kingdom from Islamic conquest.
Throughout the 14th and 15th centuries a few writers and cartographers remained loyal to the Asiatic legend. The discovery that the Abyssinian Prester was but a faint shadow of the great potentate of the earliest versions of the legend may well have suggested that this African king was not, after all, the fabulous Prester John.
It is certain that the Jesuit mission which established itself at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th century thought that the Priest King still ruled in Cathay, that mysterious land described by Marco Polo. It was only after 1603, when a member of that mission, one Benedict Goes, had been despatched to investigate this possibility and in so doing found that Cathay was one and the same as China, a land about which much had been learned during the course of the 16th century, that it was concluded that there remained no place on earth where the great Christian king might still reign.
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The Portuguese continued to call the Negus of Abysinnia by the name of Prester John, and the rest of the world has followed suit. The name, however, became no more than a convenient title for a minor king. The legend of Prester John, like many other legends of the Middle Ages, fell before the relentless advance of modern geographical knowledge. And yet, in the development of that knowledge it had played a most significant part.
In its youth this legend encouraged the exploration of the land route between Europe and Central Asia and the Far East; in its middle age it assisted the discovery of the direct sea route to the Indies; even at the moment of its death it was still strong enough to lead to the identification of Cathay with the Chinese Empire.
This article originally appeared in the May 1957 issue of History Today under the title ‘Prester John’.
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