Prester John

But the account of his journeys was written in Arabic.

and had no influence on european knowledge which indeed had little to learn from him after marco polo except with regard to the sudan with him the history of mediaeval geography may be fairly said to end for within eighty years of his death began the activity of prince henry the navigator with whom the modern epoch begins meanwhile india had become somewhat better known chiefly by the travels of wandering friars who visited it mainly for the sake of the shrine of st thomas who was supposed to have been martyred in india mention should also be made of the early spread of the nestorian church throughout central asia as early as the seventh century the syrian christians who followed the views of nestorius began spreading them eastward founding seas in persia and turkestan and ultimately spreading as far as pekin there was a certain revival of their missionary activity under the mongol khans but the restricted nature of the language in which their reports were written prevented them from having any effect upon geographical knowledge except in one particular which is of some interest the fate of the lost ten tribes of israel has always excited interest and the legend arose that they had been converted to christianity and existed somewhere in the east under a king who was also a priest and known as Prester John.

Now, in the reports brought by some of the Nestorian priests westward, it was stated that one of the Mongol princes named Unkan had adopted Christianity, and as this in Syriac sounded something like John the Kohen, or priest, he was identified with the Prester John of legend, and for a long time one of the objects of travel in the East was to discover this Christian kingdom.

It was, however, later ascertained that there did exist such a Christian kingdom in Abyssinia, and, as owing to the erroneous views of Ptolemy, followed by the Arabs, Abyssinia was considered to spread towards farther India.

The land of Prester John was identified in Abyssinia.

We shall see later on how this error helped the progress of geographical discovery.

the total addition of these mediaeval travels to geographical knowledge consisted mainly in the addition of a wider extent of land in china and the archipelago of japan or sipangu to the map of the world The accompanying map displays the various travels and voyages of importance, and will enable the reader to understand how students of geography, who added on to Ptolemy's estimate of the extent of the world east and west, the new knowledge acquired by Marco Polo would still further decrease the distance westward between Europe and Sipango, and thus prepare men for the voyage of Columbus.

It was called by the natives the Zaire, and is now known as the River Congo.

Of course, now that Temujin was obliged to fly himself from his native country, and abandon his hereditary dominions, as he had done before, he was glad of the opportunity of requiting to the son the favor which he had received, in precisely similar circumstances, from the father, and so he gave Temujin a very kind reception.

There is another circumstance which is somewhat curious in respect to Vang Khan, and that is that he is generally supposed to be the prince whose fame was about this period spread all over Europe, under the name of Prester John, by the Christian missionaries in Asia.

These missionaries sent to the Pope, and to various Christian kings in Europe, very exaggerated accounts of the success of their missions among the Persians, Turks, and Tartars.

And at last they wrote word that the great Khan of the Tartars had become a convert, and had even become a preacher of the gospel, and had taken the name of Prester John.

The word Prester was understood to be a corruption of Presbyter.

A great deal was accordingly written and said all through Christendom about the great Tartar convert, Prester John.

There were several letters forwarded by the missionaries, professedly from him, and addressed to the Pope and to the different kings of Europe.

Some of these letters, it is said, are still in existence.

except in the most poetic sense, right? Like if you go all the way back to the Rashidun Caliphate or Charlemagne, they liked the idea of there being four great empires of the cardinal directions, right? There's an emperor in the West, which is the Holy Roman Emperor, an emperor in the East, which is the Caliph, And then they would fill in the north and south, usually with mythical, semi-mythical figures.

Sometimes Prester John, the Christian emperor attributed to Abyssinia, Ethiopia, and medieval imagination.

Sometimes that would be the emperor of the south.

But, you know, like the emperor of the north might as well have been Ned Stark, right? It was that kind of age.