page_title: Prester John
section_title: Origin of the legend
hierarchical_section_title: Prester John / Origin of the legend
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Priesterkönig Johannes, Illustration aus der Weltchronik von Hartmann Schedel 1493 /eigenes Foto (Originalmanuskript in Privatbesitz) English: Prester John as depicted in the chronicles of Hartmann Schedel (1493).
context_page_description: Prester John was a legendary Christian patriarch, presbyter, and king who was popular in European chronicles and tradition in the 12th to 17th centuries. He was said to rule over a Nestorian Christian nation lost amid the Islamic caliphates and pagan lands of the Orient, in which the patriarch of the Saint Thomas Christians resided. The accounts are varied collections of medieval popular fantasy, depicting Prester John as a descendant of the Three Magi, ruling a kingdom full of riches, marvels, and strange creatures.
  At first, Prester John was imagined to reside in India; tales of the Nestorian Christians' evangelistic success there and of Thomas the Apostle's subcontinental travels as documented in works like the Acts of Thomas probably provided the first seeds of the legend. After the coming of the Mongols to the Western world, accounts placed the king in Central Asia, and eventually Portuguese explorers came to believe that they had found him in Ethiopia.
context_section_description: Though its immediate genesis is unclear, the legend of Prester John drew strongly from earlier accounts of the Orient and of Westerners' travels there. Particularly influential were the stories of Saint Thomas the Apostle's proselytizing in India, recorded especially in the 3rd-century work known as the Acts of Thomas. This text inculcated in Westerners an image of "India" as a place of exotic wonders and offered the earliest description of Saint Thomas establishing a Christian sect there, motifs that loomed large over later accounts of Prester John. 
  Similarly, distorted reports of the Church of the East's movements in Asia informed the legend as well. This church, also called the Nestorian church and centered in Persia, had gained a wide following in the Eastern nations and engaged the Western imagination as an assemblage both exotic and familiarly Christian. Particularly inspiring were the Nestorians' missionary successes among the Mongols and Turks of Central Asia; French historian René Grousset suggests that one of the origins of the story may have come from the Kerait clan, which had thousands of its members converted to Nestorian Christianity shortly after the year 1000. By the 12th century, the Kerait rulers were still following a custom of bearing Christian names, which may have fueled the legend.
  Additionally, the tradition may have drawn from the shadowy early Christian figure John the Presbyter of Syria, whose existence is first inferred by the ecclesiastical historian and bishop Eusebius of Caesarea based on his reading of earlier church fathers. This man, said in one document to be the author of two of the Epistles of John, was supposed to have been the teacher of the martyr bishop Papias, who had in turn taught Eusebius' own teacher Irenaeus. However, little links this figure, supposedly active in the late 1st century, to the Prester John legend beyond the name. The title "Prester" is an adaptation of the Late Latin word "presbyter", literally meaning "elder" and used as a title of priests holding a high office (indeed, presbyter is the origin of the English word priest).
  The later accounts of Prester John borrowed heavily from literary texts concerning the East, including the great body of ancient and medieval geographical and travel literature. Details were often lifted from literary and pseudohistorical accounts, such as the tale of Sinbad the Sailor. The Alexander romance, a fabulous account of Alexander the Great's conquests, was especially influential in this regard.
  The Prester John legend as such began in the early 12th century with reports of visits of an Archbishop of India to Constantinople, and of a Patriarch of India to Rome at the time of Pope Callixtus II. These visits, apparently from the Saint Thomas Christians of India, cannot be confirmed, evidence of both being secondhand reports. What is certain is that German chronicler Otto of Freising reported in his Chronicon of 1145 that the previous year he had met Hugh, bishop of Jabala in Syria, at the court of Pope Eugene III in Viterbo. Hugh was an emissary of Prince Raymond of Antioch, sent to seek Western aid against the Saracens after the Siege of Edessa; his counsel inspired Eugene to call for the Second Crusade. Hugh told Otto, in the presence of the pope, that Prester John, a Nestorian Christian who served in the dual position of priest and king, had regained the city of Ecbatana from the brother monarchs of Medes and Persia, the Samiardi, in a great battle "not many years ago". Afterwards Prester John allegedly set out for Jerusalem to rescue the Holy Land, but the swollen waters of the Tigris compelled him to return to his own country. His fabulous wealth was demonstrated by his emerald scepter; his holiness by his descent from the Three Magi.
  Robert Silverberg connects this account with historic events of 1141, when the Qara Khitai khanate under Yelü Dashi defeated the Seljuk Turks in the Battle of Qatwan, near Samarkand. The Seljuks ruled over Persia at the time and were the most powerful force in the Muslim world; the defeat at Sam
caption: Prester John from Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493
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