The Kingdom of Prester John

Technorati Tags: Unknown kingdoms,Prester John

 

The mysterious Presbyter Johannes, known as Prester John, is said to have sent a letter to the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Comnenus in 1165. He said that his kingdom ran from the ruins of Babylon to beyond India. Elephants, dromedaries, horned men, centaurs, satyrs, giants, and the fabled phoenix lived in his land, and the kings of 72 nations honored him.

The domain of Prester John contained a fountain of youth – whoever drank from it three times would never grow older than 30. he ruled his kingdom using a magic mirror in which he could see everything that took place within his vast empire. John’s army, consisting of 10,000 horsemen and 100,000 foot soldiers, was led by 14 bearers carrying gold crosses studded with jewels.

 

Realm Of Prester John

Searches for an Imaginary Kingdom: The Legend of the Kingdom of Prester John (Past and Present Publications)

The Route to Prester John

 

The earliest mention of Prester John occurs in a chronicle of history up to 1156 compiled by Otto of Freisingen. Freisingen says that in 1145 Bishop Hugh of Gebal (modern Jubayl in Lebanon) visited the pope and told him of a certain king and priest called John, who lived in the remote east and was descended from one of the Magi – the three wise men who attended the newborn Jesus in Bethlehem. Prester John and all his people were Christians. A few years earlier, after defeating the Medes and Persians, he had intended to march on and free Jerusalem from the infidel but was halted by the River Tigris.

Rumors of Prester John that were circulating at a time when Christendom was fighting the Crusades prompted Pope Alexander III to seek an alliance with Prester John, and on 27 September 1177 he wrote him a letter, which he gave to his physician Philip to deliver Philip never returned.

It was an impossible mission, for nobody knew where Prester John’s kingdom was. Rumors about it sprang partly from tales of the Orient told by travelers, partly from traditions of the Nestorian Christians, a heretical sect that from AD 428 onwards spread from Constantinople as far as China. Nestorians in Tartary remembered a leader called “King John” of whom they told “ten times more than was true.” The Venetian traveler Marco Polo suggested John had been put to death or captured by Genghis Khan early in the fourteenth century. This report did not destroy people’s faith in the ageless ruler or in the existence of the marvelous kingdom – they simply relocated it in Ethiopia, which had been Christian since the fourth century.

 

The Prester Quest

The Land Of Prester John – A Chronicle Of Portuguese Exploration

 

 

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Unicorns

Technorati Tags: Unicorns,Legend,Origins

 

Unicorn horns were highly prized in medieval times. The treasuries of St Mark’s in Venice and of Milan cathedral in Italy, as well as those of Queen Elizabeth I of England and James III of Scotland (1497 inventory), each had at least one, as did a number of other wealthy churches and rulers, including members of the Medici family – the acknowledged experts in the use of untraceable poisons.

For several hundred years a very profitable trade was maintained in fake horns for their supposedly medicinal properties and as an antidote to all known poisons – generally in powdered form. It is recognized today that the horns in the great treasuries were the ivory tusks of narwhals or walruses, often called “sea unicorns,” in line with the medieval belief that every land animal had a marine equivalent.

 

The Last Unicorn

Dragons, Unicorns, and Sea Serpents: A Classic Study of the Evidence for their Existence

Narwhal Unicorn of the Sea (Smithsonian Oceanic Collection)

 

But did the white unicorn with the golden horn depicted in so many medieval manuscripts and tapestries ever exist? Descriptions of this fabulous beast vary from text to text. Ctesias, a Greek physician who visited the Persian court in 416 BC, wrote about a wild animal in India that was larger than a horse, with a white body, dark red head and dark blue eyes, and a horn about 45 centimeters long on its forehead, white at the base, black in the middle and crimson at the sharp tip.

Ctesias’s unicorn is generally thought to be a combination of the wild ass of India, the rhinoceros, and the fleet-footed Tibetan antelope which has long straight horns – viewed from the side these would look like a single horn. Indian rulers had drinking beakers supposedly made from the horns of unicorns but actually from rhinoceros horns. They were painted with bands of rich color and were said to protect users from sickness and poisoning.

Writing in the first century AD, Roman writer Pliny the Elder referred in his Natural History to a wild “monoceros,” which had a long single black horn in the center of its forehead. It was hunted by the Orsaean Indians and could not be taken alive. The unicorn, or re’em, of the Old Testament was probably the European wild ox, or aurochs – a two-horned species, which became extinct.

 

Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia

Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny the Elder (Oxford Classical Monographs)

 

Medieval writings are concerned more with the symbolism and powers of the unicorn than with its appearance. Traditionally there is only one way to capture one. The sweet smell of a virgin maiden entices the beast to lay its head in her lap, and it can then be taken. The unicorn was interpreted as a symbol for Christ, because of its majesty, purity, and the belief that it could purge any water source of poison by dipping its horn into it; the unicorn’s capture was seen as symbolizing the conception and Incarnation of Christ, the virgin as representing the Virgin Mary.

A belief in unicorns is not restricted to Western cultures – the Chinese ki-lin is said to have a stag’s body, horses’ hooves, and a single horn about 4 meters long growing in the middle of its forehead. Unlike the Western unicorn, which can be fierce and even belligerent, ki-lin is gentleness itself, eats nothing living and will not step on the tiniest insect of blade of grass.

 

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