A book composed from so many fragments, by an author whose identity and motive remain uncertain, resists definitive summary of its purpose. Iain Macleod Higgins, one of the foremost recent authorities on Mandeville, offers an appealingly non-dogmatic assessment of the Book’s nature. It “represents a new kind of work that attempts to entertain, instruct, persuade, chastise, challenge, and console its imagined audience,” and its author is “an entertainer, teacher, moralist, and geographer, as well as a trickster and an artist.”99 Higgins recommends that readers embrace the heterogeneity of the Book and the diversity among its myriad versions rather than seeking a “best text” or trying to identify a single message among its “sometimes unsettling contradictions” and argues that it is more than a compilation of existing texts and its author no mere plagiarizer. In his view, the Mandeville author achieves a kind of originality in his collation, revision, and “sometimes inspired overwriting of its sources” and that one of its goals is to place the marvelous East as envisioned by previous authors “under the sign of Christian history.”100
Johannes Witte de Hese’s book provides a less well-known fictional travelogue. Scott Westrem, its editor and translator, explores how the author “combined reading, conversation and fantasy to construct a unique image of the world.”101 Next to nothing is known about Witte, whose name itself may be a fiction, except that he appears to have been Dutch and possibly a cleric. He claims to have traveled eastward on pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas via Jerusalem, Egypt, Sinai, and Ethiopia, then carried on to the Land of Prester John, India, China, the Earthly Paradise, Purgatory, and an island of extraordinary races and beasts. This all supposedly took place in the late 1300s, and the earliest manuscript of the book is datable to about 1424. Westrem, while taking the book’s fictional status as obvious, points out that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers “accepted it as a source of generally factual information” and it was not until the eighteenth century that its veracity was challenged.102 The Itineraries’s distinction lies in its effort to link widely diverse geographic and mythical locations within a Christian framework. Also, like Mandeville, the author seems to have done his work in a scriptorium, although he does not make his borrowings as obvious as his predecessor does.103 Westrem counts eight Latin and three Dutch manuscripts in current collections and numerous incunabule and sixteenth-century Latin and Dutch printed copies, but as three of the surviving manuscripts are merely handwritten copies of an early printed edition the work probably had a limited pre-1500 audience.104 Ethnographic or practical details are of no interest to the author; his East is a Christianized world of marvels.
The final item on our tour is The Letter of Prester John, chronologically the earliest of our chief sources as well as the most broadly influential. The Letter was a major source for both Mandeville and Witte and indeed in some ways a foundational text for all late medieval travel writing.105 It was produced probably around 1165, and though it purports authorship by a magnificent Indian priest-king, it was almost certainly written in Latin by a western European author. It contains very little that its author could not have picked up from sources widely available in Europe.106 In a classic essay, Bernard Hamilton argues the Letter was produced for imperial propagandistic purposes on behalf of Frederick Barbarossa. The identity of Prester John and his Christian kingdom were drawn from two earlier texts. The first of these, by Odo, abbot of St. Rémi at Reims and independently by an anonymous source, described the meeting of a mysterious “Indian” archbishop (named “John” in the anonymous text) with Pope Calixtus II in Rome in 1122. The second, from 1145 (just after the Fall of Edessa in 1144), was Otto of Freising’s account in The Two Cities of “a certain John, king and priest, who lived in the extreme east beyond Armenia and Persia” and had won a major victory against the Persians. Hamilton makes the case for the Letter’s forgery in support of Barbarossa’s quest to establish imperial power over his papal rival: “In the utopian world of the Indies supreme power in both church and state was vested in the Priest King. Prester John’s kingdom mirrored the kind of empire which Barbarossa was trying to establish.”107
The Letter’s evocation of a spectacularly rich Christian kingdom in the distant East, presided over by a ruler who was at once priest and king, possessed a powerful and flexible appeal for European readers well beyond the reign of Frederick Barbarossa. Generations of crusaders and their promoters took heart from the notion of a vast realm under Christian kingship somewhere to the east of Saracen territory.108 The ongoing significance of the Letter, for our purposes, lies partly in the continuing quest for Prester John in Asia and, from the early fourteenth century, Africa.109 Carpini, Simon of St. Quentin, Rubruck, Marco Polo, Monte Corvino, Jordan, Odoric, Mandeville, Witte, and Niccolò all speak of Prester John as a true king, contemporary or historical.110
The widespread popularity and shifting content of the Letter indicate its appeal went beyond both propagandistic and crusading impulses. There are more surviving copies of The Letter of Prester John than almost any of the travel narratives discussed in this book, rivaled only by Mandeville, with over 260 manuscripts in Latin and many vernaculars.111 As a relatively short piece it presumably had the advantage of cheapness and seems to have been purchased by readers of varying social backgrounds. An interesting instance of this is the copy in Oxford, Bodleian MS Digby 86, a late thirteenth-century “layman’s common-place book or miscellany.”112 Its Anglo-Norman and Middle English contents include prayers, devotional works, charms and prognostications, romances, fabliaux, humorous lyrics, games and party tricks, medical recipes for people and hunting birds, and other useful tidbits including different procedures for removing unwanted guests and malignant spirits from a house. The largely lighthearted content of the manuscript might reveal the Letter’s entertainment value.113 In contrast, a number of the Letter’s manuscripts were found in monastic and scholars’ libraries.114 These audiences perhaps responded to the theme of moral utopia in the Prester’s Christian Indies, where all travelers and pilgrims are greeted with hospitality and there are no poor, thieves, plunderers, flatterers, or liars, as well as no avarice, division, adultery, or vice.115
The Letter of Prester John would have satisfied a range of desires for educated laymen, friars, and enclosed monks. Its vivid evocation of a vast distant realm of incredible fertility, riches, and marvels must have met a European hunger for the exotic and wonderful. Prester John describes his own dominion in almost biblical terms: “If you truly wish to know the magnitude and excellence of our Highness and over what lands our power dominates, then know and believe without hesitation that I, Prester John, am lord of lords and surpass in all riches which are under heaven, in virtue and in power all the kings of the wide world.”116 His land contains all manner of exotic beasts and monstrous peoples, from elephants and dromedaries to one-eyed men and Cyclopes.117 “Milk is flowing and honey abundant,” and it produces pepper in large quantities. The river Ydonis, with its source in Paradise, flows throughout the realm and contains precious gemstones.118 The Letter devotes most of its latter section to a description of Prester John’s own palace, adorned and indeed partly constructed of gems, crystal, and gold reminiscent of Revelation’s description of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:9, 18–21).119
The Letter of Prester John seems at first glance to be the definitive account of eastern alterity—and has been plausibly construed as such by recent scholars120—yet the biblical imagery and cadences of its prose fasten it securely to the traditions of the European, Latin imagination. Indeed, it could be said to evoke Sameness as much as Otherness. Prester John is an eastern potentate who provides a shining model of what western rulers would like to be. The king and his people—and this can hardly be too strongly emphasized—are Christian. In the cultural context of high and late medieval western Europe, where religious faith served as the ultimate marker of identity, these eastern Christians are like long-lost brothers or spiritual kin: “We wish and long to know if, as with us, you hold the true faith and if you, through all things, believe our lord Jesus Christ. … I am a devout Christian, and everywhere do we defend poor Christians. … We have vowed to visit the Sepulcher of the Lord