Empires of the Monsoon

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 the Prester. They were questioned on their return: did they see him or, at the very least, did they hear about him? Few dared say no.

Marco Polo had embellished the legend in a rather discouraging way, by declaring that Prester John was long since dead, killed by the Mongol leader Chinghiz Khan in ‘one of the greatest battles ever seen’. The Prester himself had been a Mongol, albeit a Christian, and Marco turned him into a somewhat unpleasant figure whose arrogance led to his own downfall; when Chinghiz had politely asked for his daughter as a bride, Prester John replied fiercely that he would rather ‘commit his daughter to the flames’. That had led to the disastrous war. The descendant of Prester John was a king named George, a mere vassal of the Great Khan.

Even if Marco’s account was highly confused, there was a certain historical basis for it, because back in 1141 an immense battle had indeed been fought in the Katwan valley near Samarkand between the followers of a nomad from north China named Yelu Dashi and the army of Sanjur, a Muslim sultan; the opposing sides were reputed to have thrown a total of 400,000 horsemen into the field, and when Yelu Dashi emerged triumphant he went on to capture Samarkand. Although not a Christian, he was supported by the heretical Nestorians and was sympathetic towards them (even calling one of his sons by the suitably warlike name of Elijah). It is likely that Nestorian merchants had brought news of Yelu Dashi’s victory westwards to the Levant, since it was only three years later that Bishop Hugh of Jabala had travelled to Rome and told there how a great victory had been won ‘in the uttermost East’ by a Christian king named John.

If by the start of the fourteenth century Marco Polo had declared Prester John to be dead – and by any rational judgement, he had to be – the time might seem to have arrived for Europe to stop believing in him. On the contrary, his fame was fanned into new life by ‘Sir John Mandeville’, an imaginary English knight whose fictitious memoirs claimed to be an account of thirty-four years spent travelling in the East.

Who wrote the Mandeville text remains an enigma, but it was someone with a talent close to genius. He was possibly an Englishman born in St Albans, north of London, who in about 1350 had fled across the Channel to Liège – another cathedral city – after committing some grave crime. Perhaps he was a dealer in precious stones, for his narrative reveals a compulsive interest in diamonds. His 70,000-word tour de force was written in French a few years before he died in 1372. At his deathbed was a Liège lawyer and fellow-writer, Jean d’Outremeuse, who has sometimes been wrongly named as Mandeville’s creator.

The surname of the fictitious Sir John could have been derived from William de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, a twelfth-century crusader who sailed from England to the Holy Land with a fleet of thirty-seven ships. (While on this expedition he had helped the Portuguese to fight against the Muslims in a battle during which 40,000 men were killed.) But the stratagems by which the Mandeville author hid his own identity scarcely matter beside the impact of his work on all levels of European society for several centuries. He was not recognized for what he was – a brilliant confidence-trickster who had pillaged the memoirs of many real travellers, Marco Polo among them – but was revered as a trustworthy witness to the world’s wonders.

Mandeville’s Travels was destined to be the first book ever printed in Europe in a language other than Latin, when a Dutch version came out in 1470; by 1500 at least twenty-five editions had appeared. Part of the narrative’s success derived from its grotesque stories, sometimes with a sexual element; even the familiar Roman and medieval tales of lands where husbands invite other men to lie with their wives are worked over once more. This was the kind of earthy secular writing which the Church condemned yet never quite managed to outlaw. The author knew how to forestall religious criticism: as the climax of his story, readers are introduced to the country of Prester John, most virtuous of Christian monarchs.

The writer of the original Prester John letter had motives easy to understand. He wanted to tell the beleaguered Christians of Europe that they were not alone, that succour might be at hand. The motives of whoever called himself Sir John Mandeville are more intriguing, for there was small prospect of financial reward. Perhaps he was merely an ‘armchair traveller’, amusing himself in his last days by drawing together the favourite tales of a lifetime’s reading. Indeed, his closing sentences are distinctly plaintive, talking of ‘rheumatic gouts’ and of ‘taking comfort in wretched rest’. He ends by asking his readers to pray for him; then he will pray for them. If within the work there lies some religious or political motive, it is hard to discern across a gulf of six centuries.

Had he lived to see it, the Mandeville author would have marvelled at the huge and lasting success of his travelogue. One sure result was to sustain the Prester John myth in the minds of those European powers, and in particular, the Portuguese, who were looking for new routes to the Indian Ocean lands of pepper, spices and jewels. To find the priest-king would be a service to God, while acquiring earthly wealth. Thus a medieval legend was destined to buttress the needs of the Age of Discovery: even Columbus, crossing the Atlantic in search of Cipango (Japan) and the land of the Great Khan, had carefully studied Mandeville. It is unlikely, however, that Columbus really expected to meet Prester John, if only because Mandeville had moved the priest-king westwards from where Marco Polo had placed him to become the ‘great emperor of India’. Moreover, the name of the elusive monarch was no longer seen as belonging to an individual; that would strain gullibility too far.

So ‘Prester John’ became a title, for bestowal upon the ruler of any suitable Christian kingdom discovered in the East. The name was used in precisely such a way in the Mandeville story: ‘This emperor, Prester John, takes always to wife the daughter of the Great Khan; and the Great Khan also in the same wise the daughter of Prester John. For they two are the greatest lords under the firmament.’ (It demonstrates Europe’s ignorance of events in Asia that the writer seemed unaware that the Mongols, whose ruler was the ‘Great Khan’, had fallen from power almost a century before he was writing.)

As early as 1306, when the Mandeville author had yet to put pen to paper, one scholar had already pointed to Ethiopia as the kingdom of Prester John. It happened because of a remarkable visit to Europe by a thirty-strong Ethiopian delegation sent to the Pope and ‘the King of the Spains’ to seek help against the Muslims. Spain may have been chosen from all the European countries because there was an active Catalan trading station in Alexandria, as well as an Orthodox patriarch who traditionally appointed the head of the Ethiopian Church. If Spanish aid were forthcoming, said the Ethiopians, they were ready to join in a war against the infidels.

The mission apparently gained little, apart from expressions of friendship; but on their way home from Rome and Avignon, where they had been received by Pope Clement V, the Ethiopians were delayed in Genoa by bad weather. A learned priest, Giovanni da Carignano, took the chance to interrogate these strangers, whose looks were so unfamiliar. Being a cartographer, he was keen to learn all he could about the geography of Ethiopia, as well as its customs and religious rites. The Ethiopian king, according to Father Giovanni, was Prester John. Since the visitors would never have called their own king Prester John (his name was Wedem Ar’ad), the title must have been bestowed by Giovanni; since the Prester was by then regarded as being in India, and Ethiopia was commonly called Middle India, this was a reasonable assumption.

Another priest who decided to place the legendary Christian king in India was a Dominican named Jordanus, from the town of Sévérac in southern France. His life-story is obscure, but by his own account he made two hazardous journeys to the East in the early part of the fourteenth century and was granted the title by his religious order of ‘Bishop of Columbum in India the Greater’. (‘Greater India’ was probably seen by Jordanus as embracing South India, Sri Lanka and Thailand; Columbum was the port of Quilon, near Calicut.)

There were Christian communities in southern India, reputedly dating back to the time of St Thomas; the saint is said to have gone to India in A.D. 52 to spread the Gospel and eventually died there. Jordanus was being sent to cajole these wayward believers towards Roman orthodoxy, as well as to win new converts. All the evidence suggests that he made little headway; moreover, although the stories of Prester John and St Thomas had often become tangled together, the adventurous Dominican had been disappointed to find no trace at all of the Christian emperor in India the Greater.

The answer lay elsewhere, and on his return home Jordanus pointed confidently to Ethiopia. While not claiming to have visited their country, the friar had been in ‘Greater Arabia’, where he had learned that the Ethiopians were ‘all Christians, but heretics’. He had a fondness for monsters: ‘Of Aethiopia, I say that it is a very great land, and very hot. There are many monsters there, such as gryphons that guard the golden mountains … The lord of that country I believe to be more potent than any man in the world, and richer in gold and silver and in precious stones. He is said to have under him 52 kings.’ Jordanus also offered a description of East Africa, which he called ‘India Tertia’: it was inhabited by dragons breathing fire, unicorns so fierce that they could kill an elephant, and ‘black, short, fat men’.6

What Jordanus said about Ethiopia in 1330 marked a decisive stage in relating the legend to a semblance of truth. The friar had almost certainly been helped in his travels by Genoese merchants, and a 1339 map drawn by Angellino da Dalorto, a Genoese, said that the Muslims of Nubia were ‘warring continuously with the Christians of Nubia and Ethiopia, who are ruled by Prester John, a black Christian’.

At last, the kingdom of Prester John, having been sought all across Asia, had come to rest in Africa. While the reality might be far more humble than three centuries of grandiose exaggeration, it was enough to bear Portuguese piety and commercial enterprise along upon the same optimistic wind.

By the fifteenth century there was a small colony of Europeans living in Ethiopia. Almost all were Italians, mainly from Venice, Florence and Genoa. Some had gone to the ‘land of Prester John’ in the hope of acquiring precious stones; others may have become stranded while trying to reach the Indian Ocean by way of the Nile and the Red Sea. One of the earliest visitors whose name has survived is Pietro Rambulo, sometimes referred to as ‘Pietro di Napoli’ (he actually came from Messina, in Sicily, then part of the state of Naples). Rambulo reached Ethiopia in 1407 as a young man, took a local wife soon afterwards, and lived there for forty years.

His influence upon relations between Europe and his adopted home were to be considerable, as first appeared in 1428 when an Ethiopian mission reached Alfonso V of Aragon. The decision by the Ethiopians once again to approach a Spanish ruler, as they had in 1306, was most probably due to lobbying by Rambulo, because Alfonso held Sicily and was on the point of acquiring Naples as well. The emissaries proposed on behalf of Yishaq, the king who had sent them, that the two royal families should be united by marriage: Alfonso should send one of his sons to marry an Ethiopian princess, and an Ethiopian prince would be married to a daughter of Alfonso. The king side-stepped this proposition, but did agree to supply a team of artisans (who all died on the way).

Two years later Rambulo is recorded as accompanying a delegation sent to Ethiopia by the Due de Berry, who had Spanish connections. In 1432 Rambulo halted near Constantinople, and there met the Burgundian traveller Bertrandon de la Brocquière. Since his companions on the delegations had died, Rambulo was doubtless hoping to recruit at least one extra European to present to the Ethiopian monarch. So he ‘made many efforts’ to induce la Brocquière to come with him to Axum, the Ethiopian capital. Although the Burgundian remarks in his memoirs that he had met Rambulo before (without saying where), he also speaks deprecatingly of the fondness of ‘Pietro di Napoli’ for concocting outrageous stories, such as the Ethiopian scheme to divert the Nile and starve out Egypt. Pietro’s offer was turned down.

The failure of the mission to Spain did not seem to lower Rambulo’s standing with Zara-Yacob, the new emperor of Ethiopia, for his next diplomatic mission was to India and China. In 1450 he was again despatched to Europe, with an Ethiopian envoy named Brother Michele, and after a gap of twenty years was once more received in audience by Alfonso of Aragon.

Rambulo now took the opportunity to visit his birthplace. In Naples he was interviewed by a Dominican monk, who wrote down a brief account of the career of this intriguing character. The monk describes Rambulo as being tall, tanned by the sun, handsomely attired and white-haired. This is the last glimpse of him that history affords.

The good fortune of Rambulo had been that he was often allowed out of Ethiopia, whereas other foreigners who came there were not: Zara-Yacob treated them well, giving them wives and land, but refused to let them leave. He may have feared that while on the road they would be captured and tortured by the Muslims to extract information useful in war. Escape for his ‘prisoners’ was impossible, since there was only one route out, northwards to the Red Sea port of Massawa, and that was both hazardous and well guarded.

Such facts as the Portuguese had collected about the country were fragmentary enough to let them cling to the Mandeville fantasies of Prester John’s invincibility: ‘This emperor, when he goes into battle against any other lord, has no banners borne before him; but he has three large crosses of gold full of precious stones; and each cross is set in a chariot richly arrayed. And to keep each cross are appointed ten thousand men of arms and more than one hundred thousand footmen.’

Undeterred by the dangers, several Franciscan missionaries now managed to reach Ethiopia and make their way to the king’s court. Although one Venetian friar who wrote an account of the trip felt obliged to talk of ‘the great king Prester John’, his opinion of Ethiopia was decidedly low:

This country has much gold, little grain, and lacks wine; it has a very large population, a brutish people, rough and uncultured. They have no steel weapons for combat. Their arrows and spears are of cane. The king would not take the field with a force of less than 200,000 or 300,000 people. Each year he fights for the faith. He does not pay any of those who take the field, but he provides their living and exempts these warriors from every royal taxation. And all these warriors are chosen, inscribed and branded on the arm with the royal seal. No one wears woollen clothes because they have none, but instead they wear linen. All, both men and women, go naked from the waist upwards and barefoot; they are always full of lice. They are a weak people with little energy or application, but proud.

Had he read them, these contemptuous judgements would have enraged Zara-Yacob, the most powerful Ethiopian ruler in the fifteenth century, since he was expanding his domains by driving the Muslims back towards the Red Sea. Zara-Yacob was also brandishing at Egypt the wildly improbable but oft-repeated threat that he would divert the course of the Blue Nile. In a letter to Cairo in 1443, he warned Sultan Jamaq that he could do so at that very instant; only his fear of God and reluctance to cause human suffering held him back.

Zara-Yacob was annoyed on hearing that Europeans were calling him Prester John, remarking that he had a perfectly good name already, meaning ‘Seed of Jacob’. The emperor also conceded nothing in terms of piety: his subjects were ordered to have the renunciation of the devil tattooed on their forehead, and any who demurred were beheaded.