The Fantastic Kingdom of Prester John
A 12th-century letter to the Pope and two emperors shocked the medieval world: who really was Prester John, the mysterious priest-king who set himself up as a defender of Christianity?
Prester John, by the grace of God, the most powerful king over all Christian kings. We greet the Bishop of Rome, sovereign of the Christians, Frederick, emperor of Rome and the world, and the noble lord and king of Constantinople, Emanuel. We inform you about ourselves, our state, and the governance of our land. That is to say, about our people and our types of animals. We let you know that we worship and believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who are three persons in one deity and one true God only. We assure and inform you through our sealed letters with our seal about the state and conduct of our land and our people. And if there is anything we can do, let us know because we will do it very gladly. And if you wish to come here to our land, for the good that we have heard of you, we will make you lord after us, and we will grant you great lands, lordships, and dwellings. Know that we have the highest crown in all the world. As well as gold, silver, and precious stones.
And good farms, villages, cities, castles, and towns. Know also that we have under our command forty-two kings, most powerful and good Christians. Know that we support with our alms all the poor who are in our land, whether they are our fellow citizens or foreigners, for the love and honor of Jesus Christ. Know that we have promised and sworn in our good faith to conquer the sepulcher of Our Lord and all the promised land. And if you wish, we shall have it, God willing, provided you have in you great and good courage, as it has been reported to us that you have good, true, and loyal courage... Know that near that region there is a fountain such that whoever can drink from it three times while fasting will not have diseases for 30 years, and that when one has drunk from it, it will seem as if they have eaten all the best dishes and spices in the world; and it is all full of the grace of the Holy Spirit. And whoever can bathe in the fountain, if they are a hundred or a thousand years old, returns to the age of thirty-two years. And know that we were born and were sanctified in the womb of our mother, and thus we have spent 562 years and have bathed in the fountain six times. Know that no Christian king has as many riches as we do, as no man who wants to earn can be poor in our land... If you want something from us that is in our power, let us know, for we will do it very gladly. And we pray that you keep in mind the memory of the holy crusade, and that it may be soon, and have good heart, great courage in you, and we pray that you send us a response through the bearer of these letters of introduction. Praying Our Lord that He grant you to persevere in the grace of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Written in our holy palace, in the year five hundred and seven of our nativity. Here end the peculiarities of the men, the beasts, and the birds that are in the land of Prester John.
(Summary of the translation from Old French).
This is the text of the letter that in 1165 reached Frederick Barbarossa, Pope Alexander III, and Manuel Comnenus, Emperor of Constantinople. A serious letter, signed Presbyter Johannes, written in Latin using cultured words and referring to the political situation of the time, though combined with an incredible list of exaggerations taken from medieval bestiaries. It was pompous, clearly intended to amaze the simple folk of the time...
It is difficult to think of it as a forgery; who at the time would have dared so much? Indeed, the political reality of the moment was quite complicated. The year 1100, contrary to what one might think, was a rather prosperous era economically. The Crusades had opened new trade routes and the Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land provided raw materials and spices to the entire Old Continent. Locally, in the 12th century, there was an expansion of Law and Jurisprudence that favored new forms of contracts: in a sense, feudalism was surpassed to see the birth of what would become the small and large commercial bourgeoisie. Specifically, this translated into a gradually subsequent independence of cities and territories, think of the communes in Northern Italy and also the Hanseatic League in Germany...
This was to the detriment of the temporal power of the Holy Roman Empire, effectively a puppet entity with a significantly more limited actual territory than the nominal one that encompassed all of Europe. Meanwhile, the Norman kingdoms in England, Scandinavia, Normandy, and Southern Italy made the Empire merely a shadow. But not only that: also the kingdom of France, the Aragonese kingdom in Spain, and the increasingly growing power of the knightly orders, especially the Templars and Hospitallers, undermined Frederick's prestige. The idea of losing the Italian communes could not be accepted by a proud man like Barbarossa, hence the idea of a campaign to reconquer Northern Italy, with subsequent invasion and consequent defense by the cities of the Po Valley with the famous Lombard League supported by Pope Alexander III (the same to whom the newly founded city of Alessandria in Piedmont was dedicated). In the Middle East, the situation was no better: the loss of Edessa in 1144 by the Christians to the advantage of the Saracens had closed one of the routes on the Silk Road, the northern one that passed through Syria. Thus, dark omens of defeat hung over the heads of the Crusaders who had divided up the Holy Land... Still twenty years and Jerusalem would return to Muslim hands, so the fears were well-founded.
However, if someone intervened behind the Muslims, someone who came with fresh forces and an army like the one described, then Christendom would have triumphed... For this reason, the news of the letter sent by this mysterious Prester John brought a general wave of enthusiasm.
Yet, historically, as we know, no king from a rich realm boasting men with one foot and thousands of fortresses and birds capable of carrying elephants on the battlefield came to the aid of the Christian kingdoms in Palestine. After Jerusalem was lost to Saladin, it took another century before the West lost its last stronghold in the Holy Land: Saint John of Acre in 1291.
In between, there was the terrible invasion of the Mongols that even terrified the Saracens… To the point that one might think that dear Prester John later became the distorted image of a much more famous invader, Genghis Khan. But who constructed this nonexistent figure at the drawing board? And deep down, was he really nonexistent? Pope Alexander certainly didn't believe much in the matter.
Firstly, if it was true that there was a Christian king and also a priest beyond the Caucasus, he was also a heretic: a Nestorian, to be precise. Therefore, he sent a letter to be entrusted to merchants intended for Prester John in which the pope briefly urged the mysterious king to provide more details about the location of his kingdom, after which he would send the Archbishop of Venice, Filippo, as an ambassador to also indoctrinate him into the fundamentals of Catholicism. In 1172, the Emperor of the East also responded to the letter but his ambassadors died in a sandstorm in the territories of present-day Iraq.
The memory of Prester John lingered for countless years, as a sort of deus ex machina who would soon intervene in favor of the Christians: around 1185 a monk in Syria reported having visited the kingdom, which he placed beyond Persia but before India.
Giovanni del Pian dei Carpini, the pope's ambassador at the Mongol court which had conquered China, recounted how Genghis Khan's son had been defeated by a Christian king whom he considered Ethiopian. But Ethiopia was in Africa...
Later on, at the end of the 1400s, King John of Portugal seemed to believe this theory, sending an embassy to the Ethiopian kingdom and discovering that there indeed was a Christian sovereign, the Negus. In fact, Ethiopia is the only historically Christian state in all of Africa, although the religion practiced there is Coptic. Was the Ethiopian king the famous Prester John? Marco Polo in the 1300s spoke at length about this figure, but it is known how the Venetian traveler's reconstructions could suffer from inaccuracies.
According to him, Prester John was the ruler of a kingdom that extended into Siberia and Tibet, and his subjects were called Tartars. He was defeated by Genghis Khan and nothing more was heard of him. In the West, as previously mentioned, it was said that the same Mongol emperor was Christian, by virtue of his conquests. The person who claimed to have seen this kingdom with his own eyes was the Englishman John de Mandeville, an explorer (though it would be more accurate to call him a fabricator) who around 1350 traveled across Europe recounting the marvelous exploits of his stay... Mandeville is certainly a man of imagination, and his work would be quite entertaining to read if it were not approached from a historical perspective.
And in our view, there are only two possible solutions. The first, accepted by historians as the more likely, is that the kingdom of Prester John was actually the Uighur kingdom, a vast territory originally located in Xinjiang, west of the Gobi Desert in China, which at the height of its expansion extended from the Aral Lake to Manchuria.
The Uighurs were a Mongol-Tatar tribe of Buddhist religion which, according to some scholars, converted to Nestorian Christianity at some point, exactly as Pope Alexander III suspected Prester John professed. The Nestorians are actually the autonomous Assyrian church that developed in an area stretching from Iraq to Persia and thus could have easily come into contact with the Uighur culture; therefore, Prester John was undoubtedly the Uighur sovereign of the corresponding era, namely Yeliutashi, who ruled from 1126 to 1144.
Phonetically, Yeliutashi is quite similar to Johannes, and thus the problem seems to have resolved itself... However, this does not diminish the relevance of the internal European motivations that would have led to the sending of such a letter to the three most powerful figures of the 12th Century. Motivations that only an order, which makes mystery its banner, could have realized... We refer to the Templars, with whom the Uighurs certainly had commercial contacts in the Holy Land. On the Tartar-Christian people, the warrior monks might have artfully grafted a much more complex arcane story, with the purpose of sending a "message" to Christendom.
Our thesis emphasizes the wonders listed by Prester John himself, particularly the fountain of youth that has made many explorers dream who have vainly searched for it across the four corners of the globe, from Australia to Borneo to Yemen to Florida...
The fountain of youth described in the letter from Prester John appears as a precise reference to what in the medieval era was attributed to the Philosopher's Stone. In reality, immortality would only be symbolic: the "fountain," the "stone," are archetypes of an initiation message whose purpose, as in modern Freemasonry, is the enlightenment of the alchemist. A man who from raw and unenlightened matter indeed becomes enlightened with wisdom, self-awareness, and an understanding of the universe, and automatically enhances his spirituality until he becomes a god-man. A divine human superior to whom we all can aspire, just as all travelers who reach the kingdom of Prester John can drink from that fountain of youth...
But the road is long and difficult, in our view, this kingdom is a metaphor for the subterranean realm of Agartha, that is, the origin, the first source of flesh and wisdom! Seen in this light, Prester John is like the King of the World, a king-priest who possesses a physical-temporal power and a spiritual power much greater than that of the pope himself.
The disdain with which Alexander III responded to the letter leaves no room for doubt: the Bishop of Rome saw the issue on a purely material, utilitarian, and even practical-heretical level (the Nestorians to be converted), demonstrating that he did not grasp the initiatory meaning of the text. As often happens with Masonic initiation texts, like Mozart's "The Magic Flute," the message is divided on two levels: one for the ignorant people, with a story that amazes and entertains them; a second, occult, for the educated man capable of understanding the esoteric, hidden, concealed meaning. A meaning that is potentially dangerous, even subversive. And in that particular historical context, someone, perhaps the Templars, dared to tell Europe "Dear sirs, the Holy Land is lost if we do not find the path to true spirituality, true immortality, that of the soul." The sense of Alchemy is the same: to rediscover man and put him back at the center of the universe, not out of pride, but because that is his role, because enlightenment is his duty.
In our articles on Witchcraft, we have emphasized how the medieval witch practicing magic and blessings endangered the monopoly on spirituality held by the Christian Church. Indeed, the writer of the Prester John letter was aware of that same great inner strength in people that allows them, all of them, to bless water and salt without intermediaries appointed by institutions that pretend to be holy but are fundamentally man-made… This is what Prester John represented: but as we know, no one took the matter too seriously. The few ambassadors sent died of hardships in the desert: and on that kingdom, real or metaphorical, of wonders, silence fell forever.
