Article Letter of Prester John
The year was 1144. Christian crusaders were getting beaten up by Muslim armies in Edessa. European rulers were wondering how they could ever recover from these losses.
But just then, in this moment of defeat for the Europeans, there came a glimmer of hope. The Europeans heard a rumor about a Christian King of great wealth who ruled in the East and was willing to come to the aid of the crusaders. The king’s name was Prester John.
Naturally, the Europeans were intrigued. They figured that if Prester John actually did exist, then he could help shift the tide of the wars in the holy lands back in their favor.
Twenty years passed with no sign of Prester John, but then, out of the blue, a letter from him showed up, addressed to the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus. The European rulers rejoiced. The rumor was correct. Prester John did exist!
In his letter, Prester John described his immense kingdom, which he said stretched from India to the land where the sun rises. He wrote that fantastic creatures inhabited his land, creatures such as seven-horned bulls, birds so large that they could lift and kill an armored man, and horned men with three eyes in the back of their heads. Finally, he claimed that there was a fountain in his kingdom whose waters allowed men to stay perpetually young.
This all sounded great to the Europeans. In fact, they could scarcely believe their luck, and they began to plot how they could enlist the aid of this faraway King to help bring about the worldwide triumph of Christianity.
Supposedly the Pope, compelled by this vision of a global Christian kingdom, instructed his personal envoy to travel east, search for Prester John, and deliver a reply to his letter. But what the medieval readers of the Prester John letter never seemed to realize, but which is quite obvious to its readers today, is that the letter was nothing more than a skillful hoax.
The author of the Prester John letter remains unknown, though he was probably a cleric who constructed its fantasies out of old legends (such as the legends of Alexander the Great’s adventures in the East). The letter was probably intended to offer hope to the Christian armies fighting the crusades, and in this respect it certainly succeeded, even though the hope was a false one.
In fact, the hoax succeeded so well that the legend of Prester John lay like a heavy, unavoidable shadow over the next four centuries of European exploration. The quest for his mythical kingdom tormented European explorers. Wherever they went in the world, they searched for it. Both Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville, who wrote in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries respectively, claimed that they had found it. Since it is quite certain that his kingdom never existed, these claims must be taken as prime examples of the medieval travel lie.