For more than a hundred years, the Western world has been hearing rumor and report of him: a direct descendant of the royal Magi who first worshiped the Christ child, hence himself royal and devoutly Christian, and furthermore wealthy and powerful and wise. As the Christian monarch of a reputedly immense Christian realm, he has been a figure to tantalize Western imagination. Given our fragmented West, of many and little nations, ruled by comparatively petty kings and dukes and such, forever warring against each other—and a Christianity continually sprouting new and schismatic and antagonistic sects—we needs must look with wistful admiration on a vast congeries of peoples all peaceably united under one ruler and one supreme pontiff, and both of those embodied in one majestic man.
Also, whenever our West has been beleaguered by heathen savages swarming out of the East—Huns, Tàtars, Mongols, the Muslim Saracens —we have fervently hoped and prayed that the Prete Zuàne would emerge from his still farther East and come up behind the invaders with his legions of Christian warriors, so that those heathens would be caught and crushed between his armies and ours. But the Prete Zuàne never has ventured out of his mysterious fastnesses, neither to help the Christian West in its recurrent times of need nor even to make demonstration of his existence in reality. Does he then exist, and if so, who is he? Does he really hold sway over a far-off Christian empire, and if so, where is it?
I have already speculated, in my earlier published chronicle of my travels, that the Prete Zuàne did exist, in a sense, and in that sense may still exist, but he is not and never was a Christian potentate.
Back when the Mongols were only separate and disorganized tribes, they called each tribal chief a Khan. When the many tribes united under the fearsome Chinghiz, he became the only Eastern monarch ruling over an empire resembling the one rumored to belong to the Prete Zuàne. Since the time of Chinghiz, that Mongol Khanate was ruled in part or in whole by various of his descendants, before his grandson Kubilai became Khakhan and enlarged it even further and consolidated it more firmly. All of those Mongol rulers down the years had different names, but all were titled Khan or Khakhan.
Now, I invite you to notice how easily the spoken or written word Khan or Khakhan could be misread or misheard as Zuàne or John or Johannes. Suppose a long-ago Christian traveler in the East misheard it so. He naturally would be reminded of the sainted Apostle of that name. It would be no small wonder if he thereafter believed he had heard mention of a priest or bishop named for the Apostle. He had only to mingle the misapprehension with the reality—the extent and power and wealth of the Mongol Khanate—and by the time he went home to the West he would have been eager to tell of an imaginary Prete Zuàne ruling an imaginary Christian empire.
Well, if I am right, the Khans probably did inspire the legend, through no doing of their own, but they are not Christians. And they never have owned any of the fabulous possessions ascribed to that Prete Zuàne—the enchanted mirror in which he spies on the distant doings of his enemies, the magic medicaments with which he can cure any mortal ill, his man-eating warriors who are invincible because they can subsist only on the enemies they vanquish—all those other fanciful marvels so reminiscent of the Shahryar Zahd’s stories.
This is not to say that there are no Christians in the East. There are, and many of them, individuals and groups and entire communities of Christians, to be found everywhere from the Mediterranean Levant to the farther shores of Kithai, and they are of all colors, from white to dun and brown and black. Unfortunately, they are all communicants of the Eastern Church, which is to say followers of the doctrines of the fifth-century schismatic Abbot Nestorius, which is to say heretics in the eyes of us Christians of the Roman Church. For the Nestorians deny the Virgin Mary the title of Mother of God, they do not allow a crucifix in their churches, and they revere the despised Nestorius as a saint. They practice many other heresies besides. Their priests are not celibate, many of them are married, and all are simoniacs, for they will not administer any of the sacraments except for a fee of money paid. The Nestorians’ only tie with us real Christians is that they worship the same Lord God, and recognize Christ as His Son.
That at least made them seem more kin to me and my father and uncle than did the far more numerous surrounding worshipers of Allah or Buddha or even more alien divinities. So we tried not to abhor the Nestorians too much—even while we disputed their doctrines—and they were usually hospitable and helpful to us.
If indeed the Prete Zuàne existed in actuality, not just in the Western imagination—and if, as rumored, he were a descendant of one of the Magi kings—then we ought to have found him during our traverse of Persia, for that is where the Magi lived, and it was from Persia that they followed the Nativity star to Bethlehem. However, that would have made the Prete Zuàne a Nestorian, since those are the only sorts of Christians existing in those parts. And in fact we did find among the Persians a Christian elder of that name, but he could hardly have been the Prete Zuàne of the legend.
His name was Vizan, which is the Persian rendition of the name rendered elsewhere Zuàne or Giovanni or Johannes or John. He had been born into the royalty of Persia—had indeed been born a Shahzadè, or Prince—but in his youth he had embraced the Eastern Church, which meant renouncing not only Islam, but also his title and heritage and wealth and privilege and right to succession in the Shahnate. All of that he had forsworn, to join a roving tribe of Nestorian bedawin. Now a very old man, he was that tribe’s elder and leader and acknowledged Presbyter. We found him to be a good man and a wise man, and altogether an admirable man. In those particulars he well fit the character of the fabled Prete Zuàne. But he reigned over no broad and rich and populous domain, only a ragtag tribe of some twenty impoverished and landless shepherd families.
We encountered that bunch of sheep herders on a night when there was no karwansarai nearby, and they invited us to share their camping ground in the middle of their herd, and so we spent that evening in the company of their Presbyter Vizan.
While he and we made our simple meal around a small fire, my father and uncle engaged him in a theological discussion, and they ably discredited and demolished many of the old bedawi’s most cherished heresies. But he seemed not in the least dismayed or ready to discard the shreds they left of his beliefs. Instead, he cheerfully turned the conversation to the Baghdad court we had recently inhabited, and asked after all there, who were of course his royal relatives. We told him that they were well and thriving and happy, although understandably chafing under the overlordship of the Khanate. Old Vizan seemed pleased with the news, though no whit nostalgic for that life of courtly ease he had long ago given up. Only when Uncle Mafìo chanced to mention the Shahrpiryar Shams—making me inwardly flinch—did the ancient shepherd-bishop heave a sigh that might have denoted regret.
“The Dowager Princess still lives, then?” he said. “Why, she would be nearly eighty years of age by now, as I am.” And I flinched again.
He was silent for a time, and he took a stick and stirred the fire, and stared thoughtfully into its heart, and then he said, “Doubtless the Shahrpiryar Shams no longer shows it—and you good brethren may not credit my telling of it—but that Princess Sunlight in her youth was the most beautiful woman in Persia, perhaps the most beautiful of all time.”