Prester John

Prester John (Latin: Presbyter Johannes) is a legendary Christian patriarch and king popular in European chronicles and tradition from the 12th through the 17th century. He was said to rule over a Nestorian (Church of the East) Christian nation lost amid the Muslims and pagans of the Orient. The accounts are varied collections of medieval popular fantasy, depicting Prester John as a descendant of the Three Magi, ruling a kingdom full of riches, marvels, and strange creatures.

At first, Prester John was imagined to reside in India; tales of the Nestorian Christians' evangelistic success there and of Thomas the Apostle's subcontinental travels probably provided the first seeds of the legend. After the coming of the Mongols to the Western world, accounts placed the king in Central Asia, and eventually Portuguese explorers convinced themselves that they had found him in Ethiopia.

Origin of the legend

Though its immediate genesis is unclear, the legend of Prester John drew strongly from earlier accounts of the Orient and of Westerners' travels there. Particularly influential were the stories of Saint Thomas the Apostle's proselytizing in India, as recorded in the 3rd-century work known as the Acts of Thomas, and reports of the Church of the East in Greater Persia. The Church of the East, also called the Nestorian church, had gained a wide following in the Eastern nations and engaged the Western imagination as an assemblage both exotic and familiarly Christian. Particularly inspiring were the Nestorians' missionary successes among the Mongols and Turks of Central Asia; René Grousset (1970) suggested that one of the seeds of the story may have come from the Keraites, which had thousands of its members converted to Nestorian Christianity shortly after the year 1000. By the 12th century, the Keraite rulers were still following a custom of bearing Christian names, which may have fueled the legend.

Prester John (novel)

Prester John is a 1910 adventure novel by John Buchan. It tells the story of a young Scotsman named David Crawfurd and his adventures in South Africa, where a Zulu uprising is tied to the medieval legend of Prester John. Crawfurd is similar in many ways to Buchan's later character, Richard Hannay.

Plot

The setting is contemporaneous with publication: the beginning of the twentieth century. Crawfurd grows up in Kirkcaple, by the North Sea, where he first encounters the antagonist, Laputa, performing a ritual on the beach. Crawfurd's father dies, and he goes to work as a shopkeeper in a place called Blaauwildebeestefontein.

Crawfurd comes into contact with a Portuguese man, Henriques, and again with Laputa, and he gradually learns of illegal diamond smuggling and of a planned rising of the native people of the region, including the Zulu people and the Swazi people, led by Laputa. Laputa's skill as a preacher allows him to inspire many tribes across the region to follow him, and he invokes the legend of Prester John and positions himself as the rightful heir and leader who can rise up against colonial rule. Crawfurd learns more about this after meeting Captain Arcoll, who leads the colonialist army and police.

Prester John (disambiguation)

Prester John is a Christian king in medieval legend.

Prester John may also refer to:

See also