The mysterious Prester John: Legendary medieval king of a lost Christian empire

In 1145, during the height of the Crusades, when Christian Europe was struggling to hold the Holy Land, a Syrian bishop named Hugh of Jabala arrived at the papal court of Rome and delivered astonishing news: somewhere in the East, a powerful Christian king had defeated the Muslim rulers of Persia and was marching to aid the Crusaders.

The German chronicler Otto of Freising recorded this account in his Chronicon, in which he explicitly identified the victorious king as one “John, a wealthy and powerful priest and king”.

He was even said to be a descendant of the Three Magi of Biblical fame. According to Otto’s account, John had stormed the Persian capital of Ecbatana, but he could not reach Jerusalem because the raging waters of the Tigris River blocked his way.

This news excited the medieval Europeans. 

At the time, the Crusader states in the Holy Land were under constant threat, and Western Christians were eager for any sign of help.

A distant Christian king “in the Far East beyond Persia and Armenia” sounded like a godsend.

It suggested that the spread of Christianity had reached remote lands, and, if true, it raised the prospect of a pincer movement against Islam: European crusaders from the west, Prester John’s armies from the east.

However, it is no coincidence that the legend appeared shortly after the fall of the crusader stronghold of Edessa (1144) and during preparations for the Second Crusade.

In fact, Pope Eugene III’s call for that crusade may have been inspired somewhat by the rumor.

In these early mentions, Prester John is described as a Nestorian Christian, which was a part of an Eastern church that was technically viewed as heretical by Rome, yet still Christian.

This lent the story an exotic but credible flavor, since Nestorian churches were commonly known to exist in Asia. 

Unfortunately, no further news of Prester John surfaced for twenty years. That is, until a strange document suddenly began circulating in Europe in around 1165.

At this point, various Western rulers from Constantinople to Rome apparently received copies of a letter that was said to be written by Prester John himself.

It was addressed to the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Komnenos. It was in Latin and opened with the impressive title “John, by the grace of God, the illustrious and magnificent King of the Indies, and a faithful Christian”, and it described his far-flung realm in fantastical detail.

It spoke of his domain as the “Three Indies”, a land full of incredible wealth, natural wonders, and marvelous creatures: from elephants, camels and a variety of mythical beasts.

The letter also boasted that 72 kings paid homage to John. The monarch went on to claim that he lived in a palace made of gems and gold, and ruled over a people who knew neither poverty nor sin.

Prester John humbly styled himself ‘presbyter’, or ‘priest’, rather than emperor, but this did not prevent him from providing details about his power.

According to the letter, even the sultan of Cairo paid tribute to Prester John. The mysterious document then closed with the dramatic promise that Prester John would someday journey to Jerusalem to worship at the Holy Sepulchre and help liberate it from the infidel. 

This Letter of Prester John was an instant medieval bestseller; copies spread rapidly in many languages, including Latin, French, German, and even Hebrew.

Monks and minstrels copied it, nobles treasured it, and, for years, people debated the specific details of its contents.

Although modern historians are certain the letter was a forgery penned by a Western writer, since its anti-Byzantine tone is a bit of a giveaway, as it addresses Emperor Manuel not as ‘Emperor’ but merely as ‘Governor of the Romans’, most 12th-century readers seemed to have accepted it as genuine.

However, not all the claims were not taken entirely at face value by all scholars of the day, but the hope that it held some kernel of truth was strong. 

As a result, European leaders treated Prester John as a real monarch in a diplomatic sense.

In 1177, Pope Alexander III dispatched his physician Philip on a mission carrying a personal letter to this John.

The letter was recorded in the papal registers, and, in it, the Pope addressed him as “an illustrious and magnificent king and a beloved son of Christ” and humbly asked for his friendship.

This shows how much credence the highest authorities placed in the legend at the time. Interestingly, Philip the envoy vanished on his journey, and no reply ever reached Rome.

Nevertheless, even as late as the 15th century, when printed books began to appear, the Prester John letter was reprinted for popular audiences.

This ensured the legend stayed current into the Age of Exploration. 

As time went on, the presumed location of Prester John’s kingdom began to drift.

Initially, Westerners assumed that Prester John lived somewhere in Asia, often vaguely in ‘India’.

This term was used by medieval Europeans to loosely describe faraway Eastern lands.

But in the 13th century, the Mongol hordes burst into the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and with them came new information, and much confusion, about the East.

In 1221, news reached the West that a great conqueror called ‘King David of India’, who was said to be the son or grandson of Prester John, had smashed Muslim armies in Persia.

This rumor was specifically reported by Jacques de Vitry, the Bishop of Acre, during the Fifth Crusade.

In reality though, it was the Mongols under Genghis Khan who had defeated the Khwarezmian Persian empire around that time.

The supposed Christian ‘King David’ marching west turned out to be none other than Genghis Khan himself.

As such, he was not a Christian savior: he was a pagan warlord. 

European observers soon tried to reconcile the Mongols with the Prester John legend.

A fascinating twist emerged when friar travelers like Giovanni da Pian del Carpine in the 1240s and William of Rubruck in the 1250s, reached the Mongol courts.

They heard stories of a Central Asian tribe, the Keraites, whose leader Toghrul Khan was a Nestorian Christian.

Some Mongols even referred to this Toghrul as ‘Ong Khan’. These accounts dovetailed uncannily with the Prester John tale.

Before long, Western chronicles identified Toghrul Khan as the real Prester John.

In the Travels of Marco Polo, for instance, Polo relates a version of this story: the proud king (Polo calls him ‘Unc Can’) refuses to give his daughter in marriage to young Genghis Khan.

This leads to war; Genghis prevails and Prester John is killed. The Chronicle of Jean de Joinville similarly describes Genghis uniting the Tartars and defeating their strongest enemy, Prester John.

Behind all of these tales was the historical Toghrul Khan of the Keraites. The Nestorian Christian monarch was defeated by Genghis around 1203.

European storytellers effectively historicized Prester John, stripping away some of his magical aura and recasting him as a more ordinary, if still potent, Asiatic king. 

Even after the Mongol Empire opened up Asia to European travelers, no one ever found a glorious Christian empire matching Prester John’s description in the Orient.

As geographical knowledge improved, belief in an Asian Prester John began to wane.  

By the 14th century, Europeans had gained a clearer, even if still limited, picture of Asia, and notably no grand Christian king had been found there.

Meanwhile, they became increasingly aware of a Christian kingdom much closer to home: in East Africa.

This was the highland empire of Ethiopia, also known as Abyssinia, whose Orthodox Christian rulers traced their faith far back into antiquity.

Ethiopia had been effectively cut off from Europe by Muslim conquests along the Red Sea and Nile, but occasional contacts did still occur.

In 1306, for instance, thirty Ethiopian emissaries visited Europe, and in the records of that visit the Europeans explicitly identified the Patriarch of Ethiopia as ‘Prester John’.

From that point on, the legend of Prester John began shifting to an African setting.

The oldest surviving map to show Prester John’s realm, a 1339 portolan chart by Angelino Dulcert, places a kingdom of ‘Prestre John’ well south of Egypt.

Likewise, a 14th-century Catalan atlas depicts a king in East Africa identified as ‘Presbyter Johannes’. 

Starting in the early 1400s, Ethiopian embassies to Europe became more frequent, and they visited Venice, Rome, Aragon, and other states.

Europeans greeted them as envoys from Prester John. In 1428, the King of Aragon in Spain even negotiated, though unsuccessfully, with the Ethiopian Emperor on a proposed marriage alliance.

By the mid-15th century, it became common in Europe to refer to the Emperor of Ethiopia simply as ‘Prester John’.

European writers and mapmakers used the titles almost interchangeably. One vivid episode occurred at the Council of Florence in 1441, when Ethiopian representatives arrived to discuss church union: to their confusion, they were introduced as envoys of ‘Prester John’, a name they themselves did not recognize.

From the European viewpoint, however, all signs pointed to Ethiopia as the solution to the Prester John riddle.  

Portugal led Europe’s 15th-century maritime expansion and Portuguese leaders dreamed of reaching Prester John’s land both to outflank the Muslims and to tap into the wealth of the East.

King John II of Portugal (who reigned from 1481–1495) in particular hoped “to make contact with the Christian ruler of Abyssinia (Ethiopia).

John II launched an ambitious two-pronged expedition in 1487. He secretly dispatched two men, Pêro da Covilhã and Afonso de Paiva, to travel east overland as spies.

At the same time, he commissioned navigator Bartolomeu Dias to sail southward down the African coast, hoping to round Africa and approach Abyssinia from the sea. 

Covilhã traveled from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and on to India. Finally, around 1493, Covilhã reached the Ethiopian highlands.

He was most likely the first European in many centuries to do so. There he found the Christian kingdom Portugal had been seeking.

Covilhã was welcomed by Emperor Eskender of Ethiopia. He even married and settled in that country.

Before his integration, Covilhã managed to send back letters to Lisbon with messengers, confirming that the Ethiopian king was indeed the fabled Eastern Christian monarch.

By the time Vasco da Gama successfully sailed to India in 1498, the Portuguese were already aware that a Christian ally awaited them in Africa. 

Then, in 1508, Ethiopia sent an ambassador named Mateus, or Matthew, to Portugal, seeking military aid and inviting a permanent alliance.

In response, the Portuguese dispatched a full embassy to Ethiopia in 1520, led by Rodrigo de Lima and accompanied by a chaplain, Father Francisco Álvares.

After a long trek inland, the Portuguese delegation met Emperor Lebna Dengel, and they spent six years at his court.

Father Álvares diligently recorded everything he observed in Ethiopia: its churches, social customs, and the nature of its monarchy.

Upon returning to Europe, Álvares published a book in 1540 titled “Ho Preste Joam das Indias” (The Prester John of the Indies), which was the first detailed eyewitness account of Ethiopia for Europeans.

Notably, King Manuel I of Portugal wrote proudly to the Pope in 1521, announcing that his captains had finally “found Prester John” in the flesh, in the highlands of Ethiopia.

But what they found did not exactly match the centuries of hype. 

Álvares and his fellow envoys discovered that Ethiopia was no glorious super-empire of inexhaustible wealth.

Rather, it was a beleaguered nation constantly fighting for survival against surrounding Muslim sultanates.

Álvares reported frankly on the small scale and hardships of the Ethiopian realm.

He noted that its Christianity, though ancient, differed in practice from Rome’s and that the emperor’s resources were quite limited.

European readers came to realize that Prester John’s territory was not so vast, his people not so uniformly Christian, nor his treasury so bottomless as they had dreamed.

One contemporary summarized the sobering truth: “the Prester’s might is not as great as was thought, and even the name ‘Prester John’ is unknown to his own people – it is a fiction of ours”.

Indeed, the Ethiopians never called their monarch ‘Prester John’; that title was entirely a European invention, retroactively applied.

By 1530, a joint Portuguese-Ethiopian force was fighting to hold off an invading army led by Muslim general Ahmad Gragn.

Clearly, Ethiopia needed Europe’s help more than vice versa: a scenario utterly unlike the old legend of Prester John riding to Europe’s rescue. 

Once the reality of Ethiopia became known, the legend of Prester John gradually lost its hold on learned opinion.

In the mid-1500s, mapmakers still printed ‘Prester John’s empire’ across East Africa, but these labels faded in subsequent editions as knowledge improved.

By the 17th century, with the world’s coastlines charted and global intercourse regular, few still expected to find a magical Christian kingdom hidden beyond the horizon.

The myth had finally been recognized as just that. European scholars and clergy understood that Prester John was a patchwork of old stories rather than a flesh-and-blood monarch.

Regardless, the allure of the legend lingered in popular imagination for some time.

Writers such as Shakespeare (who alludes to Prester John in Much Ado About Nothing) and later romantics like Samuel Johnson and Umberto Eco included Prester John into their works.

But these were nods to a famous fable, not references to a believed reality. 

The irony is that while Prester John himself was never found, the pursuit of his legend led Europeans to find genuine alliances with Eastern Christians ,whether in Mongolia, India, or Africa.

In that sense, the legend had a tangible impact: it pushed explorers farther and made distant lands seem less alien.