This newsletter is going to be a little different — I came across this strange story about a supposed Christian King in the crusades who had a big impact on the world, but there was just one problem with him… A rather HUGE problem.
Considering I just made a YouTube video about this, I figured I’d share some extra findings here.
(Also, thank you for 50K subscribers! (almost))
In 1177, Pope Alexander III did something that, when you sit with it long enough, is one of the stranger things a pope has ever done (not really, but I wanted to be dramatic). He wrote a letter — an official, formal, papal letter, recorded in the Vatican registers — addressed to a king that nobody in Europe had ever actually met, a king named John who supposedly ruled somewhere far beyond Persia and Armenia, over 72 lesser kings, from a palace built of crystal and gold.
The letter asked, humbly, for this king's friendship and an exchange of ambassadors. Then the Pope handed it to his personal physician, a man named Philip, and told him to go east and find this king and deliver it.
Philip set out. And then, somewhere east of everything that was mapped and known, he simply vanished. No reply ever came back to Rome. The letter, as far as we know, was never delivered to anyone.
Nobody ever found Prester John, not because the kingdom was too remote or the search too poorly funded, but because Prester John never existed — he was a legend, a fiction, a wish that had been dressed up as a rumor and then, through a strange and almost accidental process that unfolded over decades, dressed up further as a fact.
And yet this man who was never real shaped the Crusades, expanded European literature for centuries, and played a genuine, documented role in launching the Age of Exploration. Vasco da Gama sailed around the entire continent of Africa partly because of him, in some meaningful sense, on the way to find a king who wasn't there.
The legend starts in 1145, at the papal court in Viterbo, during one of the more anxious moments in medieval Christendom's history. The Crusader state of Edessa — one of the oldest Christian cities in the world, the northernmost of the fragile little kingdoms the First Crusade had established along the eastern Mediterranean coast — has just fallen to the Muslim Turks, and the whole project of maintaining a Christian presence in the Holy Land is starting to feel genuinely scary. Into this world of crisis comes a Syrian bishop named Hugh of Jabala, sent west to beg for help, to plead for a second crusade, and while he's at the papal court he tells a story that a German chronicler named Otto of Freising writes down and that will, in one form or another, circulate for the next four centuries.
Hugh says he has heard of a great Christian king living in the far east, beyond Persia and Armenia, a descendant of the Magi from the Gospel of Matthew who governs the same lands they governed and carries, instead of a scepter, a rod made of emerald.
This king had recently waged war against the Muslim Persian forces and destroyed them entirely, and afterward he had marched his army west toward Jerusalem to help, but when he reached the Tigris River he couldn't cross it — someone had told him it froze solid in winter, and he waited on the banks through one winter and then another, but the river never froze, and eventually his army weakened and he turned back home.
What Hugh was almost certainly describing, however garbled and transformed in transmission, was a real battle that had happened four years earlier near Samarkand, in which a Buddhist Kitan warlord named Yelü Dashi had obliterated the Seljuk Turkish army — a hundred thousand troops, by some accounts, wiped out in a single engagement.
This was genuinely enormous news, because the Seljuks had been the dominant power in the Muslim world, and their defeat at the hands of a force from the east was the kind of thing that gave beleaguered Crusaders reason to hope.
But Yelü Dashi was not Christian, had no interest whatsoever in Jerusalem, and had certainly never stood on the banks of the Tigris waiting for it to freeze.
Some of his vassals happened to practice Nestorian Christianity, and that, combined with the desperate hopes of everyone hearing the story, was apparently enough. A Buddhist warlord became a Christian king who almost saved Christendom, and the story spread.
For about twenty years, Prester John remained what he had started as — a promising rumor, something people mentioned and repeated and quietly hoped might be true. And then, in 1165, a letter appeared.
Copies began circulating across Europe, supposedly written by Prester John himself and addressed to the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Komnenos, and the circulation was not gradual or quiet — over 250 manuscripts of this letter survive today, translated into Latin, French, German, English, and Hebrew, copied by monks and sung about by minstrels and treasured by nobles, making it by some estimates the most widely reproduced piece of non-religious writing in medieval Europe, a bestseller in the most literal sense of the word centuries before the printing press existed to make bestsellers easier to produce.
The letter is, by any measure, a remarkable document.
It opens with Prester John identifying himself as the illustrious and magnificent King of the Indies and a faithful Christian, and then it goes on, at considerable length, to describe his kingdom in the kind of detail that suggests either genuine information or a very fertile imagination — 72 vassal kings paying him tribute, territory stretching from India to Babylon, the body of the Apostle Thomas resting somewhere within his borders, a river flowing directly from the Garden of Eden that runs not with water but with rubies, emeralds, and sapphires.
There are no poor people in his kingdom, no thieves, no liars, no corruption of any kind. And at the center of everything, there is a fountain fed by a spring from Paradise itself.
Scholars today are essentially unanimous that the letter is a forgery, probably written somewhere in the German-speaking world by someone who knew the Romance of Alexander — a body of fantastical literature about Alexander the Great's eastern conquests — well enough to borrow liberally from its wonders.
The anti-Byzantine tone is something of a giveaway, addressing the Emperor not as Emperor but as Governor of the Romans, which is an insult, and the whole thing reads less like a genuine diplomatic “communiqué” than like a piece of political satire designed to shame the squabbling rulers of Christendom by holding up an idealized king who had unified spiritual and secular power and ruled with perfect justice.
But… Whatever its intent, and whoever wrote it, the effect was extraordinary and lasting in ways its author almost certainly never anticipated.
The legend proved, over the following centuries, to be remarkably resistant to contradiction, and this resistance tells you something important about what it actually was.
Every time explorers came close to disproving it, Prester John didn't collapse — he just relocated (lol). He started in India, moved to Central Asia when India came up empty, shifted toward Ethiopia when the Mongols turned out not to be him, and all the while the core belief held, because the core belief was never really a geographical claim. It was a psychological one, a response to the slow and grinding demoralization of watching the Crusades fail, watching Jerusalem fall and be retaken and fall again, watching the dream of a permanent Christian presence in the Holy Land gradually recede.
What makes the story genuinely strange, and genuinely significant, is that this hope eventually generated momentum — physical, world-historical momentum of a kind that almost no other myth has produced.
Prince Henry the Navigator, the man who launched Portugal's systematic exploration of the African coastline in the early 1400s, stated explicitly that his greatest ambition was to find Prester John, and his voyages south along Africa were funded and pursued partly with that goal in mind. In 1487, King John II of Portugal sent Bartolomeu Dias around the tip of Africa while simultaneously dispatching two spies overland with instructions to find Ethiopia and locate the king.
When Vasco da Gama sailed in 1497, he carried in his ship an official royal letter addressed to Prester John, because the King of Portugal still considered finding him a diplomatic priority. The most consequential voyage of the Age of Exploration was, in part, a delivery mission for a letter to a fictional man.
In 1520, a Portuguese diplomatic expedition finally reached the Ethiopian court after eight months of marching inland from the coast, and the captain of the expedition wrote in his journal, with what sounds like genuine emotion, that they saw to their great joy the tents and camps of the Emperor Prester John.
What they found was a real ruler — the Emperor Lebna Dengel, Christian, ancient in his dynasty, powerful within his own context, and in every way a dignified and interesting human being. No crystal palace, no 72 vassal kings, no fountain of youth, no salamanders spinning fireproof silk. Just a man in a tent, in a real kingdom, at the end of a very long search.
The thing I keep returning to, when I think about this story, is the strange and almost poetic irony at its center, which is that the search for something that wasn't there ended up finding things that were.
The voyages funded partly to locate a fictional Christian king mapped the African coastline, opened the sea route to India, brought Europeans into contact with Ethiopia and the Swahili coast and a world that their maps had previously left blank or filled in with monsters.
The Cape of Good Hope was rounded on the way to find a man who never existed, and the Indian Ocean trade routes that reshaped global commerce for centuries were opened by sailors who were, among other things, running an errand for a legend.
Kinda crazy when you think about it…
Until next time…
-Nils