Later accounts of Prester John borrowed heavily from literary texts concerning the East, including the great body of ancient and medieval geographical and travel literature. Details were often lifted from literary and pseudohistorical accounts, such as the tale of Sinbad the Sailor.[10] The Alexander Romance, a fabulous account of Alexander the Great's conquests, was especially influential in this regard.[11]
Priston Tale 2 CODEX
No more of the tale is recorded until about 1165 when copies of what was likely a forged Letter of Prester John started spreading throughout Europe.[17] An epistolary wonder tale with parallels suggesting its author knew the Romance of Alexander and the above-mentioned Acts of Thomas, the Letter was supposedly written to the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus by Prester John, descendant of one of the Three Magi and King of India.[21][22] The many marvels of richness and magic it contained captured the imagination of Europeans, and it was translated into numerous languages, including Hebrew. It circulated in ever more embellished form for centuries in manuscripts, examples of which still exist. The invention of printing perpetuated the letter's popularity in printed form; it was still current in popular culture during the period of European exploration. Part of the letter's essence was that a lost kingdom of Nestorian Christians still existed in the vastness of Central Asia.
The major characteristic of Prester John tales from this period is the king's portrayal not as an invincible hero, but merely one of many adversaries defeated by the Mongols. But as the Mongol Empire collapsed, Europeans began to shift away from the idea that Prester John had ever really been a Central Asian king.[34] At any rate they had little hope of finding him there, as travel in the region became dangerous without the security the empire had provided. In works such as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville[35][36] and Historia Trium Regum by John of Hildesheim,[37] Prester John's domain tends to regain its fantastic aspects and finds itself located not on the steppes of Central Asia, but back in India proper, or some other exotic locale. Wolfram von Eschenbach tied the history of Prester John to the Holy Grail legend in his poem Parzival, in which the Prester is the son of the Grail maiden and the Saracen knight Feirefiz.[38]
Ethiopia has been claimed for many years as the origin of the Prester John legend, but most modern experts believe that the legend was simply adapted to fit that nation in the same fashion that it had been projected upon Ong Khan and Central Asia during the 13th century.[52] Modern scholars find nothing about Prester John or his country in the early material that would make Ethiopia a more suitable identification than any place else, and furthermore, specialists in Ethiopian history have effectively demonstrated that the story was not widely known there until the Portuguese began to circumnavigate around Africa, which is how they reached Ethiopia (via the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea). Czech Franciscan Remedius Prutky asked Emperor Iyasu II about this identification in 1751, and Prutky states that the man was "astonished, and told me that the kings of Abyssinia had never been accustomed to call themselves by this name." In a footnote to this passage, Richard Pankhurst states that this is apparently the first recorded statement by an Ethiopian monarch about this tale, and they were likely unaware of the title until Prutky's inquiry.[53]
The prospect of finding Prester John had long since vanished, but the tales continued to inspire through the 20th century. William Shakespeare's 1600 play Much Ado About Nothing contains an early modern reference to the legendary king,[55] as does Tirso de Molina's El Burlador de Sevilla.[56] In 1910 Scottish novelist and politician John Buchan used the legend in his sixth book, Prester John, to supplement a plot about a Zulu uprising in South Africa. This book is an archetypal example of the early 20th-century adventure novel, and proved very popular in its day. 2ff7e9595c
Kommentare