THE STUFF OF LEGENDS

Our Man in the Orient (Nate Barksdale. Spring 2003, Regeneration Quarterly)

Prester John was not, despite what you might think from the name, a circus performer nor the founder of a chain of fried-food restaurants. Nor was he a magician, though he did have the trick of vanishing only to reappear in unexpected places. And if his name, once you say it a few times, seems at once both obscure and familiar, there may be a reason. For nearly half of the last millennium, Prester John was a genuine celebrity in Western Europe: the mysterious ruler of an impossibly rich and powerful kingdom just over the horizon, somewhere in Asia, or maybe Africa. He was, as the saying goes, the stuff of legends, like Elvis or Brando or the Sultan of Brunei. He was wealthy, he was powerful, and--best of all--he was a Christian.

His first authenticated appearance is in the twelfth-century chronicle of Otto of Freising, who tells of the military victories of a priest-king living in the far east. This king, known as Prester John, had defeated a combined force of Persians, Medes, and Assyrians in a glorious three-day battle and then marched to the aid of Jerusalem, which had lately been recaptured by Saracen Muslims. The journey didn’t go well for Prester John. He marched his army to the Tigris and, unable to cross it, followed the river north in hopes it would freeze during the winter. After waiting several years for the promised ice to appear, he decided that the climate was too temperate, and, his army decimated “on account of the weather to which they were unaccustomed,” the priest-king headed home. Though not much for boats or bridges, Prester John was nonetheless, even in this early account, an intriguing character: “He is said to be a descendant of the Magi of old,” Otto’s chronicle reports. “He governs the same people as they did and is said to enjoy such glory and such plenty that he uses no scepter save one of emerald.”

A couple of decades later, the story got even more impressive. In 1165, copies of a letter from Prester John to the emperor of Byzantium started making the rounds in Europe. The letter, reconstructed from later copies, began something like this: “I, Johannes the Presbyter, Lord of Lords, am superior in virtue, riches and might to all who walk under Heaven,” and went on from there. Seventy-two kings paid him tribute. Thirty thousand subjects dined daily at his table. When he rode into war, he was proceeded by three crosses of gold. On other occasions, he went forth behind a single cross of plain wood—that he might recall the humble death of Jesus Christ, whom he served.

As for the kingdom he ruled, it was a storehouse of wonders: elephants, dromedaries, mute griffins, wild oxen, and wild men. There were pygmies, giants, Cyclopes and their wives, not to mention a more or less complete collection of natural resources: emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, chrysolites, onyxes, beryls. There was a plant whose very presence in the realm frightened away demons. A spring which, if you drank from it three times, would keep you thirty years old for the rest of your life. And since it wouldn’t be the East without spices, of course there was lots of pepper.

Now it seems obvious enough, given certain details, that the letter was at least partly fictitious. And, as the novelist Evan S. Connell notes in his delightful essay on Prester John (collected most recently in The Aztec Treasure House), the leading men of Europe—being no more or less gullible than we—were doubtful even at the time. A translation of the letter by one of Richard Lionheart’s knights included a caveat familiar to anyone who has received a forwarded e-mail: This might not be true, but I thought you’d want to read it anyway. The letter was most likely seen as a veiled dressing-down of the rulers of the day, or perhaps as an attempt to revitalize the Crusades with the hope of an inter-empire coalition. Nevertheless, twelve years later Prester John and his epistle were still on everyone’s minds, so to quiet the murmurings and instruct the masses Pope Alexander iii penned a response praising John for his apparent piety and gently restating the Christian duty of submission to papal authority. Sealed and signed, the letter was entrusted to the pope’s personal physician who, as Connell dryly notes, “obediently marched off in the direction of Asia and right off the pages of history.”

Some legends are so compelling, it's no wonder folk believed them. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 29, 2003 1:04 AM