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Do you know who Prester John is? This was new to me as well; I’m reading Patrick Wyman’s The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World and his myth comes up in a chapter about Isabella I of Castile and the burgeoning Portuguese and Spanish empires:
Legend held for centuries that a Christian king of great wealth and power, Prester John, lurked somewhere on the other side of Muslim territories. If they could link up with this mythical monarch, perhaps Islam could be defeated once and for all, and the Holy Land might return to Christian ownership. This spoke to a vein of messianic destiny running through the Portuguese royal family, particularly João’s successor, Manuel I.
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 as documented in works like the Acts of Thomas 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 came to believe that they had found him in Ethiopia.
Let’s get the wiki summary on this cat:
Prester John (Latin: Presbyter Johannes) was a legendary Christian patriarch, presbyter [Editor’s Note: What?], and king.
Stories popular in Europe in the twelfth through to the seventeenth centuries told of a Nestorian patriarch and king who was said to rule over a Christian nation lost amid the pagans and Muslims in the Orient.[1]:28 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.
On the one hand this seems like a pretty silly and facile justification for a militarized land grab: “We might run into the Three Magi guy.” There’s that strand of millenarian predestination that would pop up in all campaigns of colonization, from the Crusades into the Muslim world to Manifest Destiny in the American West. But to write off The Search for Prester John as some kind of reformation-era cryptid hunt would be to miss some pretty important historical context.
There is a crucial distinction between theoretical cities like the kingdom of Prester John or El Dorado on the one hand, and purely allegorical mythical cities like Atlantis and Shangri-La on the other. These particular quests for lost cities were not illusions but hypotheses. The so-called age of exploration was built on both rumor and logical conjecture; tales of rich cities in distant lands and the discovery of cultures through trial and error. While trading on the Ivory Coast, Portuguese merchants made the reasonable inference that the spices, minerals, and slaves they were purchasing had come from the West up the Congo River - they later confirmed this by sailing up the river to claim these resources themselves. Europeans had made many such discoveries of “lost cities” through the slow process of joining global trade in the 15th and 16th centuries. The idea that there were great city states still hidden in the uncharted parts of the world was not a flight of fancy.
One of the more hammered-home lessons from The Verge is that ruling locally and internationally were no less complex in the 15th century than they are now; getting anything done has always required a careful dance of collaborating, appeasing, and opposing various interest groups inside a ruler’s polity. Proposing a multi-year campaign far from home and filled with death and deprivation, for the material gain of a small royal and merchant elite, is a hard sell. The Church will not vibe with that pitch and very few peasants will either. Now, lend the campaign a religious and cultural goal - expel the infidels from the holy land, find a Christian dude hanging out in Ethiopia for some reason - and throw in some incentives for the rank and file - better money than farming - and you’ve got yourself a popular initiative. This is not to say that European rulers were being disingenuous or purely propagandizing in their promotion of religious and cultural justifications for conquest: there is ample evidence that most European colonial rulers of strongly believed in the immaterial arguments for exploration, and Isabella of Castile in particular was devoutly Catholic. Men and women or iron determination rarely act from a simple profit motive, but are instead motivated by a matrix of interlocking beliefs. Just look at the evangelical neocons who birthed the 21st century American adventures in empire-building.
Of course the most prominent result from all this journeying and charting was not wealth and enlightenment, but death, destruction, and captivity. The process of global exploitation would begin a violent acceleration in 1492 when Christopher Columbus set foot on the island of Hispaniola, that journey being itself the product of the search for a fabled place: the Western route to the Indies. There is a straight line (or maybe tilde, since it’s Spanish) from Columbus’s landing, to Hernan Cortes and the destruction of Tenochtitlan in 1521. Ten years after that event, the first formal search for El Dorado began, with the conquistador Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada leading 800 men into the interior of Peru in an explicit search for the fabled city. As in the case of Prester John, we have a myth that is transmuted in the collective imagine, through early discovery and mistranslation, into a genuine geographical destination. But again, it was not a ridiculous concept: in his plunder of the Aztecs, Cortes claimed a then-unimaginable amount of gold, silver, and gems, and the Spanish would continue to bleed Central and South America of its precious metals and minerals (not to mention produce and manpower as well) for the next two centuries. For a time, the discovery of El Dorado must have seemed like a matter not when, not if.
As Earth’s cartographical fog was dispersed over the coming three centuries, the viability of lost cities as motivation for conquest waned, and Empire had to produce less physical goals to justify expansion: Christianity from the Atlantic to the Pacific, democracy in the Middle East. What would these goals even mean for the average citizen? What would the discovery of Prester John’s kingdom mean for the average Portuguese laborer in the 15th century? Nothing material, really, but the goals do create a sense of purpose, a sense of being part of a community and a grand plan. A sense of destiny.
I think about Star Trek a lot, the benevolence of their expedition, the ultimate utopian fantasy. The crucial but rarely stated argument justifying that fictional benevolence is that scarcity has been done away in this future, that the replicator can produce whatever one wants or needs. It’s a kind of techno-Marxist dream, that the greed and killing and domination stops when we’re no longer struggling for resources. I’m not convinced. Another way to look at the history of Western ruthlessness is through the Dark Forest hypothesis: a village you’ve heard about, on the other side of the jungle you call home - their people may be gentle, or they may be war-like. They may meet you with open arms, or they may be coming to kill you right now. Why take any chances?