Prester John: The Legend and its Sources
Title | Prester John: The Legend and its Sources PDF eBook |
Author | Keagan Brewer |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 360 |
Release | 2019-08-08 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1317076052 |
The legend of Prester John has received much scholarly attention over the last hundred years, but never before have the sources been collected and coherently presented to readers. This book now brings together a fully-representative set of texts setting out the many and various sources from which we get our knowledge of the legend. These texts, spanning a time period from the Crusades to the Enlightenment, are presented in their original languages and in English translation (for many it is the first time they have been available in English). The story of the mysterious oriental leader Prester John, ruler of a land teeming with marvels who may come to the aid of Christians in the Levant, held an intense grip on the medieval mind from the first references in twelfth-century Crusader literature and into the early-modern period. But Prester John was a man of shifting identity, being at different times and for different reasons associated with Chingis Khan and the Mongols, with the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, with China, Tibet, South Africa and West Africa. In order to orient the reader, each of these iterations is explained in the comprehensive introduction, and in the introductions to texts and sections. The introduction also raises a thorny question not often considered: whether or not medieval audiences believed in the reality of Prester John and the Prester John Letter. The book is completed with three valuable appendices: a list of all known references to Prester John in medieval and early modern sources, a thorough description of the manuscript traditions of the all-important Prester John Letter, and a brief description of Prester John in the history of cartography.
Prester John: The Legend and Its Sources
Title | Prester John: The Legend and Its Sources PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | |
Release | 2015 |
Genre | Literature, Medieval |
ISBN | 9781409474456 |
The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402-1555
Title | The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402-1555 PDF eBook |
Author | Matteo Salvadore |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 289 |
Release | 2016-06-17 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1317045459 |
From the 14th century onward, political and religious motives led Ethiopian travelers to Mediterranean Europe. For two centuries, their ancient Christian heritage and the myth of a fabled eastern king named Prester John allowed the Ethiopians to engage the continent's secular and religious elites as peers. Meanwhile, back home the Ethiopian nobility came to welcome European visitors and at times even co-opted them by arranging mixed marriages and bestowing land rights. The protagonists of this encounter sought and discovered each other in royal palaces, monasteries, and markets throughout the Mediterranean basin, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean littoral, from Lisbon to Jerusalem and from Venice to Goa. Matteo Salvadore's narrative takes the reader on a voyage of reciprocal discovery that climaxed with the Portuguese intervention on the side of the Christian monarchy in the Ethiopian-Adali War. Thereafter, the arrival of the Jesuits at the Horn of Africa turned the mutually beneficial Ethiopian-European encounter into a bitter confrontation over the souls of Ethiopian Christians.
Searches for an Imaginary Kingdom
Title | Searches for an Imaginary Kingdom PDF eBook |
Author | Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 484 |
Release | 1987 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780521322140 |
This bold synthesis fills in many of the missing links between the histories of Europe and medieval China.
The Realm of Prester John
Title | The Realm of Prester John PDF eBook |
Author | Robert Silverberg |
Publisher | Ohio University Press |
Total Pages | 471 |
Release | 2020-12-04 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0821441221 |
In this modern account of the genesis of a great medieval myth, celebrated science fiction author Robert Silverberg’s explores the mysterious origins of Prester John, the astonishing Christian potentate of the East. Prester John was a legendary figure who cast a powerful spell over Latin Christendom for almost five centuries. Rumors of the warrior-king-prelate’s fabulous realms first reached Europe in the eleventh century and quickly assumed an exalted status alongside such fabled wonders as El Dorado, The Fountain of Youth, and the Holy Grail. The defeat of a Moslem Turkish tribe by a Buddhist Chinese warlord seems to have been the unlikely historical nugget around which the Prester John myth grew, but contributions to this strange saga have also been traced all around the globe to the Apostle Thomas' apocryphal preaching in India, to the actual existence of small colonies of Nestorian schismatics in central Asia, and even to Genghis Khan.
The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality
Title | The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality PDF eBook |
Author | Denise Aigle |
Publisher | BRILL |
Total Pages | 407 |
Release | 2014-10-23 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9004280642 |
In The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality, Denise Aigle presents the Mongol empire as a moment of contact between political ideologies, religions, cultures and languages, and, in terms of reciprocal representations, between the Far East, the Muslim East, and the Latin West. The first part is devoted to “The memoria of the Mongols in historical and literary sources” in which she examines how the Mongol rulers were perceived by the peoples with whom they were in contact. In “Shamanism and Islam” she studies the perception of shamanism by Muslim authors and their attempts to integrate Genghis Khan and his successors into an Islamic framework. The last sections deal with geopolitical questions involving the Ilkhans, the Mamluks, and the Latin West. Genghis Khan’s successors claimed the protection of “Eternal Heaven” to justify their conquests even after their Islamization.
Prester John, the Mongols, and the Ten Lost Tribes
Title | Prester John, the Mongols, and the Ten Lost Tribes PDF eBook |
Author | Charles Fraser Beckingham |
Publisher | Variorum Publishing |
Total Pages | 350 |
Release | 1996 |
Genre | History |
ISBN |
This study makes an important contribution to the study of the Prester John legend and will be of interest to a wide range of scholars working in the field of medieval history and literature. The principal sources relating to Prester John are reprinted here for the first time in more than a century, together with a number of key modern articles on this topic. In addition, an international group of scholars has contributed six new studies which examine the legend in the context of Mongol history, Russian literature, the medieval Jewish accounts of the Ten Lost Tribes, the crusading movement, and the Portuguese voyages of exploration.