Gone Medieval - The Prester John Myth

Episode Date: January 14, 2023

Matt Lewis continues his Mystery Month on Gone Medieval with another tantalising enigma of the Middle Ages - the legendary figure of Prester John.There’s a long history to the myth that “out there” in the east, a pious and noble Christian king ruled over a mighty kingdom — filled with strange beasts, fabulous wealth, and colossal buildings — who was prepared to lead his army to the defence of Christendom. But Prester John never showed up to help. Did he even exist? Matt examines the facts with Medieval era historian Dr. Nicholas Morton.This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here >If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android > or Apple store > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. It's Mystery Month here on Gone Medieval and this one has cropped up a fair bit. It's one that lots of listeners have asked us to cover. So here we are. Prestor John is a name shrouded in mystery throughout the medieval period. It pops up again and again without any sign of Prestor John himself. So who was he or at least who did people think he was? What did they make of his failure to arrive? Was the whole thing a dangerous misunderstanding?

Well, to try and answer all of this and a bit more, I'm delighted to welcome back, Dr Nicholas Morton. Welcome back to Gone Medieval Nick. Thanks very much, Matt. Great to be on the show. It's fantastic to have you back. So if we dive straight into this mystery, when do the first stories of Presta John start to emerge? Okay, so the first stories begin really in the mid-12th century.

And what's so interesting about Presta John is it's very tempting to dismiss everything said about him as being a complete myth. But as we'll see, it's a little bit more complicated than that. All right, the story goes like this, that according to these reports, during the reign of Pope Callixtus II, that's 1122, there was stories about a visitor called Patriarch John of the Indians, who we're told in the source, it's on the furthest extreme of the world. I'm giving this from the source's perspective. And he went to the Byzantine Empire in order to talk to the Byzantine Emperor. And while he was there, some envoys from the Roman papacy found out who he was and invited him to come to Rome, which he did.

And then when he came to Rome, he talked about all these lands and these great territories that lay out to the east. And the great city of Holner, which he described, which was so huge and so magnificent that it had walls that two chariots could. ride along side by side without falling off. And then he went. And we could put this down to just hear say a story, except that there is another entirely separate account that reports this visit too. So whilst many of these details may or may not be in some way accurate, there seems to be some actual basis to the belief that a visitor did arrive, did announce themselves as having this name, having this title and did describe lands out to the east, which were fabulous and enormous and incredible. And then disappeared. And then disappeared. Fabulous. So what did people make of this? How did

the idea of Presta John begin to settle into the kind of Latin consciousness and awareness that there was this mysterious figure out east? The story lingers. The next major reference really comes in the 1140s. And this is a very sort of tumultuous. time in the Eastern Mediterranean because Zangi, the Turkish ruler of Aleppo and Muzul, conquered the city of Idessa, the capital city of one of the Crusader states, and this then set in motion the events of the Second Crusade. But in and amongst the reports brought by the emissary to Rome to report these events, there were also tidings that Presta John was on the march, and that he would march to assist Christendom

and his army would therefore support the Crusader States. Now, obviously this didn't happen. This simply wasn't true. There were some really big wars being fought out on sort of Persia's northeastern border, which might have given rise to this rumour. But it's interesting to see that, viewed from the perspective of the Crusader States or from the Papacy's perspective, news from the East increasingly began to be interpreted

through a kind of Presta John lens. They're expecting something to come from this direction. So 20 years after that original arrival of Patriarch John, are they imagining that this is the same person, that this is Presta John who they're vaguely friendly with, they've met him once, so they think that he's going to bring an army to help them because presumably they believe he's another Christian prince?

They do believe that. In time, people begin to say, we can't be Presta John because quite a lot of times passed, so it's probably one of his successors, and the name David gets banded about. So it's Presta John's successor, David, who's the head of Presta John's empire. Although it has to be said that the name Presta John continues in circulation for literally centuries. And even David sounds a little bit like biblical, wishful thinking as well,

that we're going to get some King David arrive to save Christendom. But the idea of Presta John, and this mythology that emerges around him, really kicks off in the 1170s, because in this time there's a very famous letter, which purports to be a letter. written by Presta John to the Byzantine Emperor. And this letter gets interpreted and copied and reinterpreted and stories get bolted on and shoved into it over the next century. And these stories include incredible things.

Like Presta John's empire includes communities of monsters. Yes, you did hear me right. Presta John's lands exist at the edge of the known world and there's an area of caves where the dragons live and certain people can be trained to become dragon masters. I'm not making this up. There's also supposed to be an island, according to one of the interpolations of this letter, and on this island is the fountain of eternal life.

I say eternal life. Apparently, for those people who drank from the fountain, they could expect the lifespan of 500 years, so not quite eternal, but still a long time. So these incredible rumours and legends get tied up with the press to John myth. And so suddenly, from the lands to the east of the Tigris River, which was about the extent of Western Christendom's knowledge during the 12th century, suddenly this rich tapestry of fable and mythology spreads out across this imagined space as people construct these mythologies of Presta John's lands that are supposed to be out there.

And I guess we have those classic medieval maps of Hereby Dragons. People genuinely did think potentially there were monsters over there. Hereby Presta John, with his monsters, yes. And if you're going to have someone on your side, it might as well be someone who can train dragons and bring monsters into their army to come and save you. So by this point, what would you think the Presta John myth was? So it's been going on for sort of 50 years already. People are thinking that there's this land out there, there's this huge empire, this army that's potentially coming to save them. At this point, 50 years in,

what do you think the Presta John story really is? A misunderstanding? Is it wishful thinking? It's many things. A Presta John myth gets linked to some things which are simply plainly true. Presta John's myth often gets linked, for example, with the various goods that are brought along the spice routes or the silk routes, which are from beyond Christendom's eastern borders. It's got nothing to do with Presta John because Preston doesn't exist. But nonetheless, they know these things are out there, and so they get tied up with the Presta John myth. So myth and reality gets spliced together. There seems to be some kind of basis to the myth, because certainly there seems to have been this one visitor who said things that provoke the myth into being. But needless to say, all the dragons and the monsters and the Fountains of Eternal Youth,

these are obviously embroideries onto this myth or wishful thinking or just storytelling run rampant and as stories get passed from generation to generation perhaps. But I think that we see something in these myths of the human experience. Because when you look at the way in which human beings and human societies have constructed mythologies about areas they know very little about, and so we could talk here, we are talking here, about Western Christendom's myths about Presta John, but we could equally talk about, for example, the Mongol Empire's myths about Egypt,

or stories and legends about places as remote and extreme as the Kingdom of England, the places that are really on the edge of the known world from other society's perspectives. Stories and legends go hand and hand with a lack of knowledge. I suppose the closest modern analogy to that would be the incredible and multifarious myths we create about either the planets on our solar system or space further afield.

We don't know what's out there. So we create myths about it. We imagine what could be out there. And those myths run riot until you get all the Hollywood films that you do about things we don't know about. The sea floor would be another area, which again can be a subject of myth or the centre of the earth or things like that. It's the unknown. And that captivates. It fascinates people.

And stories are like that perennially. Again, if I draw a reference to Hollywood movies. Hollywood movies do not feel particularly constrained by the strict factual accuracy. They want something bigger and better because human audiences want something bigger and better. And so we get the stories we do. Now, I think in so many of these stories, you see embellishment. So storytelling is still a big tradition during these times. So if you're going to retell a story, you don't want to tell the version that everyone's already heard 100 times.

Every time you retell it, it's got to get a little bit bigger and a little bit embellished and have a new flourish to it. So I guess that's how some of these stories can grow and can. continue to, you know, take on a life of their own as they spread? Yeah, a story is a sort of kaleidoscope of different ideas and themes, really. And yeah, the Presta John myth crops up in most countries in Western Christendom in some shape or form. The common themes are that there is this Christian king or emperor called Presta John or one of Presbyon's successes, somewhere out to the east. Preston presides over a magical and incredibly rich kingdom, sometimes inhabited by monsters, sometimes not. Those are the sort of core themes. And, again,

Again, it can be linked to all sorts of myths that explore us from across the ages have come up with about areas that I don't know about. And of course, the desire for money, the desire for wealth. That's often part of those myths. If the Presta John myth seems to begin in the Byzantine Empire reaches Rome not too long after that, how far does it spread? I mean, I guess once it's in Christendom, it might easily spread quite far. But how far west and north does it reach? And does the story change as it moves as well?

You and I are sitting here in England. Are there any records of what English writers say about Presta John during the medieval period? Many come in the form of letters. One of the events that really caused the Presta John myth to explode in some respects, or at least expand its existing explosion, you could say, is the Fifth Crusade. So in brief, Fifth Crusade is a really big crusading expedition that set out to conquer Egypt, the idea being to conquer Egypt and then use its enormous agricultural wealth in the Nile-Dal and the conquest of its trading cities to fund the permanent reconquest of Jerusalem.

Fifth Crusade failed, but in its early stages, it spent a year trying to conquer a coastal city called Damietta. Once it conquered Damietta, the obvious next move was to advance up the Nile towards Cairo. But for almost a year, the army did nothing. There's various reasons to that. One of them is that they were expecting the emperor of Germany to arrive with a big reinforcing army when he didn't. But one of the reasons given for this crucial delay, which goes somewhere to explain why the Crusade did not achieve its military goals, is that rumours began to emerge that Presta John was on the march, and we've heard this one before.

But this time, there was an army on the march, but it wasn't Presto John, it was the Mongols. But again, distances, hearsay, rumoured doing their work, and somewhere in the process of transmission from the people perhaps fleeing the Mongol advance, and then reaching ultimately the Crusader army, the idea that the Mongols were advanced and conquering either much of the Near East, and en route to take the rest, those rumours got morphed into a rumour that Presta John was on the march and would march to reinforce the Crusading army, which then that may go some way to explaining why the crusading army's leaders thought, let's wait, and then we'll join forces with Presta John,

and then will be more effective, although needless to say, Presta John never turned up because he doesn't exist. So is it possible that they saw Muslims being pushed sort of west by a force from the east and assumed that because it was someone fighting Muslims, it must be Christians, and that must be Presta John. So, you know, we can sandwich the Muslims between two Christian forces here. So they're just kind of reading a myth that they've heard into facts without actually, you know, they're adding two and two together and getting five. It's quite possible, and certainly they did expect Presta John would want to support them in their wars

and that they assume Presta John would see their enemies as a common enemy. Why were medieval priests so worried that women were going to seduce men with fish that they'd kept in their pants? Who was the first gay activist? And what on earth does the expression, sneezing in the cabbage mean? I'll tell you, it's not a cookery technique, that's for sure. Join me, Kate Lister on Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast where we will be bed hopping throughout time and civilization to bring you the quirkiest and kinkiest stories from history. as promised there will be sex.

Anne has said that Henry is not skillful in copulating with a woman and has neither vigour nor potency. And scandal. Everybody just descends onto this crime scene and it's being pulled apart by members of the public as quickly as they can excavate the bodies. And moments which shaped society. Pointy boobs then became a thing

and was still a thing into the 1950s. What more could you possibly want? Listen to betwixt the sheets today, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. A podcast by History Hit. So throughout these years of believing that there's this empire out in the East and there's this Christian sort of saviour who might come and rescue Christendom, does anyone go looking for Presta John? Do we have any records of anyone travelling East to try and find this empire?

Yes, and actually there were any incentives for people to do that. The wealth of Presta John's supposed empire, the notion that he could march to Christendom's aid, or just the sheer desire to explore and find something that was so fundamentally different to your own experience. The impetus is for exploration and for long journeys, going to be many, but yes, people did go, and needless to say, they didn't find him. And so in the 1240s, you've got a papal envoy called John of Plano Carpini, who went out to the Mongols on a papal embassage, but naturally he was going thousands of miles from Christendom's borders into regions that had never been reached before, at least on in time. intentionally by embassies from Western Christendom.

And on that journey, it was an obvious thing to do, to ask, where's Presta John? Can you tell me something about him? And he seems to have picked up additional stories. So people didn't just say, no, there's no such thing. Now, exactly why they supplied him with detail or stories about Preston, I don't know. Perhaps something got lost in translation. Perhaps he said something they thought he was referring to something else. I don't know. I wasn't there.

But mythology goes that Presta John was actually doing. doing quite well against the Mongols. He too was under attack by the Mongols and that part of the reason for his success was that he had assembled a line of, I see, the bronze or brass, statues. And these statues disgorged huge volumes of smoke in what must be one of the earliest examples of a sort of smoke screen being used in war because the Mongols were in battle, they relied on horse archers. and so a smokescreen could work very else. So there is a logic to what's being said. But it's thought that this smokescreen

helped Presta John's forces to resist the Mongols. But other travellers of this era, they asked what Presta John, obviously they didn't find him. They too picked up some travellers' stories, but there were the beginnings in the 1250s, people were saying, look, we've been looking for all these monsters, we haven't found them. So again, reality starting to challenge mythology

a little bit in that time. It's fascinating, though, that people are so convinced or so desperate to believe in Presta John that they actually travelled east and started asking, where's Presta John? And then it must have encouraged them that they weren't met with unknowing shakes of the head and no one knew what Presta John was. It must have reinforced their beliefs that they actually heard stories of Presta John as well, which I guess encourages you to continue to look and believe the myths. Possibly. And it's interesting, there's actually a history produced in Anatolia, modern-day Turkey, by a non-Catholic Christian author. And this source

also talks about Presta John. So it seems as if the idea of Presta John actually caught on, even outside the Latin Christendom's borders. So it's interesting to see that the myth was not just confined to Christendom's frontiers, but actually spread beyond them. I was going to ask next whether there was kind of a moment of realization when Western Christendom realized that they might have got something wrong about the Presta John myth and whether they'd mistaken the Mongols moving west for Presta John's arrival, as I mentioned before. But it sounds like they learned that potentially Presta John was also fighting the Mongols. So did they begin to realise that Presta John may not be real or do they continue to look for him in other places?

The story changes. Initially, there is some thought that Presid John was actually resisting the Mongols. Some people felt the Presta John had actually been conquered by the Mongols. Some people felt that the Mongols had conquered Preser John's kingdom, but Presid John's daughters or relatives had married Chingas Khan. And so the Mongols get spliced in with the Presta John. John Myth, but it is assumed by many writers from this era that myths and the history of the Mongol Empire are in some way linked. So it could just be that the idea of this growing empire in the East that nobody knew or understood was sort of vague stories of the emergence of the Mongols spreading West and being misinterpreted. Yeah, it's an incredible meeting of reality,

myth, half-truth, legend, all sorts of things in the same place. Is there a moment then when the Presta John myth is kind of dispelled and ended to people, stop believing it and stop looking for Prestagion? Presta John moves. Conveniently. So initially, Presta John is assumed to be somewhere to the east of the Tigris River. Western Christendom's knowledge of what lies to the east of the Tigris River is so limited that I wouldn't want to put my finger on a point in the map because they have no maps. But somewhere out to the east lies Presta John.

But increasingly, as we move into the early modern period, Preston's still there in Christendom's mythology. But increasingly, people begin to speculate that his kingdom might be found in Africa. And so in the 1490s, when Vasco da Gama began his voyage that would see him go round to the Cape of Good Hope and then into the Indian Ocean, on route, he picked up stories, apparently, of Presta John's kingdom being somewhere in Africa. But it's surprising, it's actually in the various late, early modern period that you get serious doubt being expressed that Presta John actually exists. His myth lasts a long time. And you have to wait for centuries. or people actually say, look, I don't actually think there is such a person as Presta John.

It seems as if Presta John retreats into the unknown, even as the area of the known expands, at least from Western Christendom's perspective. So I guess as long as there are places in the world that remained unexplored, that could be where Presda John was hiding, and you could cling onto this idea that there was this mythical, fantastical, incredibly rich kingdom out there somewhere. Sure, and of course, when we tell stories, even today, Sometimes we tell stories because we want people to believe that that story is based in fact

and sometimes we tell stories because they're fairy stories and so it's sometimes not easy to know what you're reading. Are you reading a story that the author intended you to read as a simple statement of fact and truth? Or are you reading something that the author was really telling as a form of entertainment? And sometimes it's hard to tell a difference. And sometimes it isn't a difference. Yeah. I'm struck by how much medieval writing that we would try to treat us history today. isn't non-fiction history as we would write it or read it today? What they're doing is wrapping up almost contemporary political messages and warnings as history. History is kind of an instructive avenue to deliver contemporary political warnings and messages.

Sure. And I think a good modern analogy I think there would be, and I don't know how many of you are on Twitter, but if you look at the way that figures from Star Wars or stories from Star Wars or ideas from Star Wars get pressed into service to make modern points going in all sorts of different directions. There is a tremendous power in mythology and storytelling to use those myths and stories as analogies for the present day. I was just going to ask, what you think the Presta John legend tells us about people living in medieval Europe who believed it or who spread it or who went looking for Presta John? We've talked a bit about

how humans can tend to read these fantastical things into things they don't know. But does it tell us more about these people what they believed, what they hoped, what they thought was out there in the world beyond what they knew? Yeah, I think that it's very easy to hear the Presta John myth and to laugh, because we know better, we know there is no kingdom of monsters, we know that there's no fountain of eternal youth, we know there's no caves at the end of the world which contain dragons, we know there's no Presta John. And so we can feel very smug about the fact that we know better than people in medieval societies, because we've found big, and better myths to believe in. And we do. And the unknown continues to inspire our imaginations

and we continue to come up with dreams and ideas about what might be found in places that we know nothing about. But actually, when I read these stories, what I see is something very familiar in the human condition and something, and yes, you can find the press to John myth in Western Christendom, you can find other myths in other civilisations, but it's human beings coming to grips with the world around them. It's trying to make sense of something that doesn't at this point make sense. It's trying to make the unknown known, and in that space is the space of human imagination. When I read these myths, I actually see something very familiar. I don't laugh at our medieval forebears, I see something that I recognize,

which is that desire to look over the horizon, what lies over the next row of hills, what is behind those mountains, and that in way, shapes and forms in human societies across the world, and I don't doubt we will continue to see it in the future. Perfectly true. I mean, I would never laugh at these things either because this is about people trying to make sense of the world around them, as you say, and that's a process that has led us to where we are today. The desire to make sense of those things is precisely what drives humanity now to try and get to the seabed, to get into space. You know, we're convinced that there'll be another planet out there somewhere that will support human life. And one day that might prove to be an absolute Presta John-style myth. Those things still exist in the human experience today, I think.

Indeed. In a sense of something quite reassuring about it, because you can see something in the past that, not entirely, but on some levels at least we can recognise in ourselves. It just goes to prove that people don't really change all that much. We're not that dissimilar from our medieval forebears. I guess to end on, is there anything left about the Presta John myth to solve? Is there anything that we could find out? Do you think there'll ever be an explanation for what the Presta John story was really about? I've got a lot of questions about this and I suspect that most of them will never be answered. It seems as though a visitor did arrive.

at the papal court in 1122. And it goes without saying that it would be wonderful to know a bit more about that individual. Who were they? Where were they from? What happened in the process of communication with the papacy? What exactly was it that they were talking about? And all those sorts of questions and trying to drill down beneath the reports of these events

and trying to find out what actually happened and what this visitor was saying, how was that heard then by the people he was speaking to? There's all sorts of ideas there. it would be interesting to see also to get more detail on the Preston myth and see how that was interpreted in different countries as probably not quite enough source material to do that. But also, again, this is something that almost certainly never been known,

but it always struck me that so many of these travellers who went out looking for Preston and received reports of Presta John, again, it would be wonderful to get the other person's perspective on that. What did they think they were hearing when a papal envoy said, have you heard of Presta John and where is he, or was that effect? Who did they think that PayPal I was talking about? And what information were they proffering and why were they proffering it? There's so many questions here.

But again, I think that in itself is something that's fascinating because it's the whole business of encounter and meeting and people from very different backgrounds who have so little familiarity with each other, sharing stories, sharing ideas, asking each other things and receiving answers in response and all the various agendas and ideas and cultures and lived experiences behind their questions. It's that moment of meeting. It's perfectly possible he was exactly what he reported to be,

but just the information got lost in translation somehow. But we'll never know. Fascinating. So the mystery continues. We're fairly sure Presta John. As the myths had him never existed, but it may have been based on a misunderstanding about a reality out in the Far East. So thank you very much for joining us, Nick, to go through that myth.

It is one that lots of listeners wanted us to cover when we deal with mysteries, and hopefully that's provided a bit more information and context, and it's been really good to get into the source material and talk about what people were actually saying about Presta John at the time. So thank you very much for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you so much, Matt. I hope that adds as much clarity as we can at the moment, at least, to the mystery of Presta John.

And Nick's books include The Fantastic, the Mongol Storm, which he spoke to us about last time he was on the podcast, and which covers the arrival of the Mongol forces in the Near East as Muslims and Christians clashed in crusades. Nick also has a YouTube channel with the handle at Medieval Near East when you can find out more about his studies about that region. I recommend going to have a look there and see if there's some videos that wet your appetite for more from the Near East.

You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. really does help new listeners to find us. If you're enjoying this and you'd like a bit more medieval goodness in your life, you can also subscribe to History Hits Medieval Monday newsletter by following the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.