Generous swaths of the Prester John letter found their way into the two most popular travel books of the Middle Ages: The Travels of Marco Polo and The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, lending credence to the travel accounts and to the Prester John legend.
Polo’s account, the earlier of the two, was written when he was a prisoner of war in Genoa in 1298 and 1299, with the help of a writer of romances known as Rustichello of Pisa. The son of a prominent Venetian merchant, Marco Polo had spent two decades in the East, traveling throughout the Mongol empire and China, and made it as far east as Burma. His father and uncle spent years in exile at the summer court of the Grand Khan, known as Shang-tu, whose kingdom served as the inspiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Xanadu, and eventually they returned to Europe as the khan’s emissaries. Marco Polo had spent much of his youth in their company.
As might be expected of its co-authors, The Travels of Marco Polo is not strictly a travelog, and it is replete with inconsistencies. It has even been suggested that Marco Polo never made it to China, despite his apparently firsthand descriptions of that region. Why did he not mention the Great Wall, for instance, or tea? Although Travels included Polo’s experiences closer to home, enlivened with shrewd observations, the account was embellished with various wonders of the East, notably Prester John, which added to its readability and appeal, even as they compromised its claims to authenticity. To compound the problem, the manuscript was written in a French-Italian dialect that defied easy translation. Nor was there anything like a definitive text; over one hundred manuscripts, all of them different, were in circulation.
Polo, a tireless name-dropper, says he first encountered Prester John by reputation, as the lord of the Tatars, the inhabitants of northern China, who “paid him a tribute of one beast in every ten.” Polo and his collaborator merged the Prester John legend with another figure at least partly inspired by an actual person, his Tatar rival. In 1200, Polo says, Genghis Khan sent word to Prester John to announce that he wished to marry the priest’s daughter. “Is not Genghis Khan ashamed to seek my daughter in marriage?” Prester John exclaimed to the messengers. “Does he not know he is my vassal and my thrall? Go back to him and tell him that I would sooner commit my daughter to flames than give her to him as his wife.” Polo’s collaborator displayed a fanciful touch by explaining that Genghis Khan became so distressed that “his heart swelled within him to such a pitch that it came near to bursting within his breast.” When he recovered, predictably enough, he decided to go to war against Prester John.
The battle—an epic struggle, according to Marco Polo—pitted the largest armies ever assembled on a “wide and pleasant plain called Tenduc, which belonged to Prester John.” This is thought to be Mongolia, but as with so much else to do with Prester John, it is impossible to know for certain. Just before taking up arms, Ghengis Khan asked his astrologers to predict the outcome, and to his delight they announced that he would carry the day. Two days later, the battle began in earnest: “This was the greatest battle that was ever seen. Heavy losses were suffered on both sides; but in the end the fight was won by Ghengis Khan. In this battle Prester John was killed. And from that day he lost his land, which Ghengis Khan continued to subdue.”
Polo adds a curious postscript to the defeat of Prester John and Christianity in China. Tenduc, Polo says, became the home for descendants of both Genghis Khan and Prester John. “The province is ruled by a king of the lineage of Prester John, who is a Christian and a priest and also bears the title ‘Prester John.’ His personal name is George. He holds the land as a vassal of the Great Khan—not all the land that was held by Prester John, but a great part of it. I may tell you that the Great Khans have always given one of their daughters or kinswomen to reigning princes of the lineage of Prester John.” Polo populates Tenduc with all sorts of marvelous creatures; even the biblical Gog and Magog can be found there. Despite these imaginative excesses, The Travels of Marco Polo inspired Europe to conceive of trading with the kingdoms of Asia, and of exploring the world. Many of the sailors on Magellan’s voyage were familiar with it, and at least one brought a copy of Polo’s account along with him.
John Mandeville served as the other great traveler and storyteller of the era. With suave assurance, he deftly mixed accounts from ancient authors with what he claimed were his personal experiences, but Mandeville was actually a compiler rather than a traveler, and he drew much of his material directly from Speculum Mundi, a medieval encyclopedia, which contained extracts from Pliny and Marco Polo, among other authorities. As a finishing touch, he wove long passages from the Prester John letter into his account and passed it off as his own work.
Mandeville told jaw-dropping stories of his pilgrimages to the Holy Land, an unlikely event; he probably never got any farther than a noble’s well-stocked library. He claimed he traversed India, which he said was filled with yellow and green people; visited Prester John’s kingdom, without giving comprehensible directions; and even made it all the way to the borders of Paradise, but failed to enter because he considered himself unworthy. He naturally claimed to have found the Fountain of Youth in the course of his travels, and imbibed three draughts of its life-giving waters: “And evermore since that time I feel me the better and wholer.”
No account of the exotic East would be complete without a discussion of spices, and when it came to this subject, Mandeville skirted close enough to the truth to lure unsuspecting readers into taking his description seriously. He sounded entirely knowledgeable about a “forest” of pepper in a Neverland he called Combar, which might or might not have been based on the Spice Islands or some other actual place. “You must know that pepper grows in the manner of wild vines beside the trees of the forest, so that it can rely on them for support. Its fruit hangs in great clusters, like bunches of grapes; they hang so thick that unless they were supported by other trees, the vines could not carry their fruit. When the fruit is ripe, it is all green like the berries of ivy. They gather the fruit and dry it in the sun, then lay it on a drying floor until it is black and wrinkled.” This account was convincing enough to inspire European merchants and governments to attempt to find the mythical spice.
Sailors setting out to sea with Magellan paid special attention to Mandeville’s unnerving descriptions of powerful magnetic rocks capable of destroying unwary ships, warning of “great sea rocks of the stone that is called adamant . . . which draws . . . iron.” In consequence, “There should pass no ships that had nails of iron there away because of the foresaid stone, for he should draw them to him, therefore they dare not wend thither.” If they did, the magnetic rock would draw the nails from the hulls, and the ships would leak and even sink.
Among other far-fetched tales that Mandeville tried to pass off as fact were talking birds (perhaps he was thinking of parrots); trees that sprout at dawn, bear fruit by midday, and die before dusk; sixty-foot-high cannibals; and women who rejoice at the rebirth of their deceased infants. For good measure, he dusted off the legend of Amazons, but made his account more explicit than those of antiquity. “These women are noble and wise warriors,” he claimed, “and therefore kings of neighboring realms hire them to help them in their wars. This land of Amazons is an island, surrounded by water, except at two points where there are two ways in. Beyond the water live their lovers to whom they go when it pleases them to have bodily pleasure with them.”