Keagan Brewer - Prester John: the Legend and Its Sources

Volume 27

About the volume

The story of the mysterious oriental leader Prester John, who ruled a land teeming with marvels and might come to the aid of Christians in the levant, held an intense grip on the medieval mind. It has received much scholarly attention, but never before have the sources been collected and coherently presented to readers. This book now brings together a fully-representative set of sources from which we get our knowledge of the legend. These texts, spanning from the Crusades to the enlightenment, are presented in their original languages and in English translation.

About the series

The crusading movement, which originated in the eleventh century and lasted beyond the sixteenth, bequeathed to its future historians a legacy of sources which are unrivalled in their range and variety. These sources document in fascinating detail the motivations and viewpoints, military efforts and spiritual lives of the participants in the crusades. They also narrate the internal histories of the states and societies which crusaders established or supported in the many regions where they fought, as well as those of their opponents. Some of these sources have been translated in the past but the vast majority have been available only in their original language. The goal of this series is to provide a wide ranging corpus of texts, most of them translated for the first time, which will illuminate the history of the Crusades and the Crusader States from every angle, including that of their principal adversaries, the Muslim powers of the Middle east.

About the translators

Keagan Brewer is affiliated with the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia.

The Legendary Prester John, c. 1599. Engraving, 20.3 15.7 cm (8 6 3/16 in.), by Luca Ciamberlano after Agostino Carracci, after Karel van Mander. Courtesy of Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Alpheus Hyatt Purchasing Fund, S1.44.2.

Photo: Imaging Department President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Editorial Board

Malcolm Barber (Reading), Peter Edbury (Cardiff),
Bernard Hamilton (Nottingham), Norman Housley (Leicester),
Peter Jackson (Keele)

Titles in the series include

Mary Fisher

The Chronicle of Prussia by Nicolaus von Jeroschin

A History of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia, 11901331

Peter Lock

Marino sanudo Torsello, The Book of the secrets of the Faithful of the Cross

Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis

Susan B. Edgington and Carol Sweetenham

The Chanson dAntioche

An Old French Account of the First Crusade

Denys Pringle

Pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, 11871291

Carol Sweetenham

Robert the Monks History of the First Crusade

Historia Iherosolimitana

Damian J. Smith and Helena Buffery

The Book of Deeds of James I of Aragon

A Translation of the Medieval Catalan Llibre dels Fets

Compiled and translated by

KEAGAN BREWER

University of Sydney, Australia

First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2015 Keagan Brewer

Keagan Brewer has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the translator of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Prester John : the legend and its sources / translated by Keagan Brewer.

pages cm. (Crusade Texts in Translation)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Prester John (Legendary character) Sources. 2. Literature, Medieval History and criticism. I. Brewer, Keagan, translator.

BR275.J7P74 2015

398.22dc23 2014043573

ISBN 9781409438076 (hbk)

The aim of this book is to collate and present the major sources for the study of the legend of Prester John. For the medieval texts, these are supplied in both the original language (usually Latin) and English translation. Because they are less material to the usual discussions of Prester John, the modern texts are presented only in English. Most of the translations here are my own; two have been reprinted with permission from their copyright holders (specifically Francisco lvares and Remedius Prutky). Although much of the material presented here has been known in the field of Prester John studies for some time, nearly all of it has only been available to those who have knowledge of various foreign languages, including Latin, German, French, and Portuguese. The primary aim has therefore been to make this material accessible, and to supplement the standard Prester John texts with less well-known material, especially from the early modern era, so we can better understand not only the legends genesis and development, but also its later evolutions and slow demise.

In many ways this work is the result of labours done not only by myself, and one must always recognise when one is standing on the shoulders of giants. The main writer to whom all those who study Prester John must pay their dues is late nineteenth-century German scholar Friedrich Zarncke. Although Zarncke himself profited from his predecessors, he is generally considered to be the founder of the academic study of Prester John, and much of the material presented here was brought to light through his thorough and ground-breaking work on the sources. Despite the fact that his writings are now almost a hundred and fifty years old, a great deal of his opinions and editorial work remain surprisingly current, and much of what has been written by authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has simply been echoing his opinions, for better or for worse.

This book is divided as follows. The introduction consists of a discussion of the thorny but important question of belief in the legend, incorporating a general outline of the history of the idea of Prester John and its mutations. Following this are the sources presented in rough chronological order, divided into thematic sections for convenience. Each section is introduced with contextual information to assist the reader, and likewise each text is individually introduced to provide its context. Three appendices are attached. The first is an annotated source list, including the bibliographical details for editions, translations and/or manuscripts for the sources presented in this book, and reference to other sources that have not been included here. The second appendix outlines the complex manuscript traditions of the most popular and important of the texts dealing with Prester John, the