—Christopher Columbus, in a letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain (1499)
AFTES 1481 the pace of Portuguese exploration was transformed, for John II came to the throne in that year. As a sixteen-year-old prince he had exulted in the massacre at Arzila, and ten years later proved implacable in his use of power. At home, John openly challenged the nobles who had bent his weak father to their will. Abroad, he showed himself adroit, especially in improving the old ties with England. Most of all, he ordered that the caravels should once more push boldly into the southern hemisphere. Their captains began charting league upon league of the African coast. Any doubts his courtiers showed were brushed aside.
This confidence was sustained in 1483 when a caravel captained by Diogo Cam reached six degrees south and came to the mouth of a vast river, the Congo. Its waters, pouring down from the African interior, etched a brown pathway far out from the shore, until they grudgingly merged into the Atlantic. It seemed to the Portuguese mariners that the river might offer a route to ‘Ethiopia’ and the Indies, so they set up a stone pillar on a headland, bearing the arms of their homeland. These hopes were foiled by sandbanks and rapids, but Cam did discover a well-organized African kingdom just south of the river. On his second journey to the Congo, in 1485, he bore lavish gifts from King John for King Nzinga Nkuwu, called the Manicongo, with a message of goodwill urging him to embrace Christianity. This pioneering bid for friendship with a non-European monarch might have seemed a portent of what would happen in the Indies: the Manicongo’s son was baptized with the name Afonso, black clerics were trained, and teams of artisans sent out from Lisbon to help Portugal’s new friends. (Significantly, the early promise was not to be fulfilled, for the Congo kingdom was soon ravaged by slave-trading.)
John II’s resolve was equally sustained by a dramatic advance in navigation, which allowed the caravels to work out their latitudes accurately, even when far south of the equator and unable to see the stars of the northern hemisphere.1 The king had turned for help to Jewish astronomers and mathematicians, especially the famed Professor Abraham Zacuto of Salamanca in Spain. The professor devised tables giving the sun’s maximum altitude on every day of the year at every latitude. These calculations were first written in Hebrew, then translated into Latin and finally into Portuguese as O Regimento do Astrolabio. The king sent his personal physician, Master Joseph, on a voyage to Guinea to test them there; he reported that Zacuto’s figures were frultless.
John II sensed the culminating moment must be at hand, almost seventy years after his great-grandfather, his namesake, had led Portugal into Africa by capturing Ceuta. His methodical mind was already pondering how to treat with a ruler he only knew as the ‘Rajah of Calicut’. A Genoese named Columbus, who was living in Portugal, had come to the Lisbon court in 1484, offering to command a voyage westwards across the Atlantic in search of the Indies. The manner in which he was rejected, making him turn instead to Spain, reflected John II’s confidence that his caravels were nearing success.
The one constant impediment, slowing down progress, was a lack of numbers. Even to man their ships going to the Guinea the Portuguese had been driven to recruit desperadoes from other parts of Europe. Such crews had been equal to their task, for the caravels then only faced black pagans armed with spears and arrows, and gunfire had easily wrought havoc among them. In the Indian Ocean, however, there might well be far more formidable enemies, and the Portuguese would be alone, at the extremity of sea routes stretching back for thousands of stormy leagues.2 The Pope was telling John II to ‘take the Ottoman Turks in the rear’. But their conquests in Egypt and Arabia had already brought the Turks close to India; by the 1480s they were advancing along the Black Sea towards Persia, and their performance in the Mediterranean proved that they could use guns at sea as formidably as on land. ‘Taking the Turks in the rear’ was unlikely to be an easy matter.
Having all the odds against them might have driven the Portuguese, so lacking in numbers, to put aside all heroic visions of striking a blow in the East for Christendom. The alternative was to go to the Indies as humble merchants, buying up cargoes of spices wherever the chance arose. Yet such a mundane role was never contemplated by King John, for he was implacably sure that Portugal would not be alone in facing the followers of the ‘false prophet Mohammed’.
Worldly-wise and ruthless, a Renaissance figure whom Machiavelli might well have admired, John II was known to his Portuguese subjects as ‘the Perfect King’. Nevertheless, he was still able to believe implicitly that ‘Prester John’, the fabled priest-king of the East, was waiting eagerly in the Indies to join hands with European Christendom. The Portuguese could put their trust in this legendary figure because the readiness to elevate make-believe above verifiable truth still flourished. Scientific thought counted for less than alchemy, witchcraft or miracles.3
The Prester John story was one of the most persistent fantasies of the Middle Ages, invented to shore up religious morale in a time of frailty, then given new impetus by a literary hoax. The readiness of the ‘Perfect King’ to put his faith in it can only be understood as the culmination of a dream, affecting the course of history. This directly influenced the European seaborne assault on Asia, and to a lesser extent the westwards search leading to the discovery of the New World. There would even be, in the end, a curious vindication.
The origins of the legend can be traced back to a tale about an apocryphal visit to Rome by a ‘Patriarch of the Indians’ spread in 1144 by Hugh of Jabala, a French-born Catholic bishop stationed in the Levant. He told of a ‘priest and king’ named John who dwelt ‘beyond Persia and Armenia in the uttermost East and [who], with all his people, is a Christian but a Nestorian’; this brave ruler had fought and defeated the Persians.
The decisive myth-making came soon after, with the appearance of a ‘Letter from Prester John’ addressed to the Pope, as well as to Emperor Manuel of Constantinople and Emperor Frederick of the Romans. All the evidence suggests it was concocted by an Archbishop Christian of Mainz, who claimed to have translated it from Greek into Latin. A Greek original was never found, and the archbishop may well have hit upon the idea of this pretence during a visit to Constantinople.
A masterpiece of invention, the letter tells of Prester John’s domain, with its crystal waters, great caches of precious stones and forests of pepper trees.4 On a mountain of fire, salamanders spin threads for the precious royal garments. Prester John speaks of his beautiful wives, and of how he limits his congress with them to only four times a year; for the rest of the time he sleeps on a ‘cold bed of sapphire’, to subdue his lust.
In a magic mirror outside his palace, says Prester John, he can discern all the intrigues of his enemies. The letter ends in a grandiose biblical vein: ‘If thou canst count the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea, judge the vastness of our realm and our powers.’ Such imagery played upon Europe’s vague notions of the lurking might of Asia.
One defence of Archbishop Christian, if he were indeed the author, is that fictitious letters were an accepted literary device in the Middle Ages. What made the Prester John forgery so much more potent was the desire in Europe, among kings, priests and peasants alike, to hold it as the truth. At a time when the Crusades had begun to falter and all the prayers asking God to intervene on the side of Christianity seemed in vain, it restored faith in the bond between religion and valour. The mysterious presbyter was an oriental counterpart of those bishops who rode into battle with studded maces in their mailed fists. He was also immensely rich, making popes and archbishops see him as a person after their own hearts, spreading a message which could be set against the urgings of Jesus to be poor and humble.
A few brave spirits, such as the philosopher Roger Bacon, were openly sceptical, hinting that the priest-king might not exist. They went unheeded. Soon the letter was being translated from Latin into almost every European language and dialect; there was even a Hebrew version. Then scribes began weaving their own fancies into it. The next stage was the invention of tales by imaginary travellers of visits to the domain of the divine monarch, and even of interviews with him. Naturally enough, all travellers to the East – especially the friars sent to Cathay by the Church – were told to look out for