#prester john

[tacccja]

pray for the people inside your head

for they won't be there when you're dead

[smbhax]

Cover illustration by Dan Panosian

Info from Grand Comics Database

[kor-artificer]

My first Kickstarter is now live!

The Kingdom of Prester John is a solo journaling RPG, that takes the player on a journey between the world in the late 1100s and the world as imagined by medieval Christians.

Back it here!

[Itch.io] - [DMs Guild] -[Twitter] - [Website]

[jurakan]

A Fun Fact for me on this freaky Friday?

Alright I have a few things I can write about, but one's been in my box of Fun Facts for a while; I just didn't know how to type this up. But no more! We're finally doing it! So! I hope you're ready for weird medieval legends, because Today You Learned about Prester John!

The story goes that a lot of medieval Europeans believed that somewhere out in the East, there was an incredibly wealthy Christian kingdom ruled by a priest monarch known as Prester John. Nobody knows exactly how this story got started, but it was remarkably persistent for centuries. And people believed a ton of things about how fantastical and rich the kingdoms of Asia were.

There were Christians out there, too--the Nestorians were the biggest group, though both Catholic and Orthodox Churches consider them heretics. My understanding is that the Nestorian Churches are all gone now, absorbed back into other denominations (if you were worried they were wiped out--they weren't). And tradition holds that both the Magi and Saint Thomas the Apostle went east, so there were attempts to connect this guy to the Biblical figures, because wouldn't that be awesome?!

There were even attempts to try to reach him. It would have been really handy during the Crusades, for instance, to have an ally in the East that could help them out (and the Mongols weren't answering their calls). There's a story that he did try to help the Crusaders out but had to turn around for this or that reason. Of course, no such contact was ever actually established. There was a "letter from Prester John" that got released and circulated, but as far as we can tell it's a hoax.

Interestingly! Marco Polo's book insists that Prester John was real... but that Genghis Khan killed him. Historians think that he was probably mixing the legend of Prester John with Toghrul, a Mongol khan who was a Nestorian Christian who got on Genghis Khan's bad side by refusing to let his children marry into the Great Khan's family (and promptly lost a war, and his life, to Genghis).

I dunno, I find it vastly amusing that Marco Polo told the story of this legendary figure and said, "Yeah that guy's totally real! He's dead now, though."

Once European people got to see more reports of India and China, they found a distinct lack of Prester John, and decided that maybe they'd gotten the directions mixed up. Maybe he was an Ethiopian king, you know? As you can probably guess, Prester John didn't turn up there, either. Eventually someone even suggested, after the Americas were discovered, that maybe he was over here somewhere--I think people were kind of tired of the story by then, though, and so it sort of died out.

Of course, he appears or is mentioned in a lot of fiction relating to historical legends. Notably, a large chunk of Umberto Eco's novel Baudolino involves the protagonist trying to find Prester John's kingdom. Inkling Charles Williams makes him an important Grail figure in his War in Heaven. He's mentioned a couple of times in the Fables comics, too. And if the show hadn't been canceled, he would have been the antagonist of season three of Netflix's Marco Polo--he's mentioned, and seen at a distance, faceless, a couple of times in season two, and the show ended with the protagonists finding an empty Mongol Camp and a bloodied cross planted in the camp, which was (in the series) apparently his calling card after he'd killed a bunch of unbelievers:

Though the legends don't really describe him that way, so, uh, not sure where they were going with that.

So! Now you know.

[gwydpolls]

Time Travel Question 34: Medievalish and Earlier 3

If you could travel through time, but only to see something for Research or for fun, not to change anything, what would you pick?

Old English to Middle English Transition

Where exactly did the Greenlanders land in North America

Meet everyone Westerners Thought were Prester John

Tape the Prophet Mohamed reciting the Koran in his own voice

The Last Decade of the Greenland Settlement

Did the Battle of Stiklestad happen?

Meet "Radamanthus" if he existed

Was there a Battle of Baden Hill. If so where? What happened.

What was "The Great Bird Slaying" (Anglo Saxon Chronicle

Heian Era Japanese Court Incense Party

First Decade of Human Settlement on Rapa Nui

Ammonites

Voting ended onDec 7, 2023

These Questions are the result of suggestions from the previous iteration.

This category may include suggestions made too late to fall into the correct earlier time grouping. Basically, I'd already moved on to human history, but I'd periodically get a pre-homin suggestion, hence the occasional random item waaay out of it's time period, rather than reopen the category.

In some cases a culture lasted a really long time and I grouped them by whether it was likely the later or earlier grouping made the most sense with the information I had. (Invention ofs tend to fall in an earlier grouping if it's still open. Ones that imply height of or just before something tend to get grouped later, but not always. Sometimes I'll split two different things from the same culture into different polls because they involve separate research goals or the like).

Please add new suggestions below if you have them for future consideration. All cultures and time periods welcome.

[tomoleary]

Dan Panosian — Thor Annual #17 Thor battles Prester John (1992) Source

[marvelman901]

Fantastic Four vol 1 54 (1966)

Whosoever Finds the Evil Eye...

Written by Stan Lee

Penciled by Jack Kirby

Inked by Joe Sinnott

Lettered by Sam Rosen

Edited by Stan Lee

Cover by Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott

The Human Torch and Wyatt Wingfoot borrowed a Gyro-Cruiser to get to the Great Refuge in the Himalayas to rescue the Inhumans from the barrier that imprisoned them.

They found an old temple, where they found Prester John, a survivor of ancient Avalon. He had a powerful artifact called the Evil Eye, which the Human Torch tried to use to destroy the barrier.

What he didn't know was that the Evil Eye was unstable and would've killed him within a short time. Luckily Wyatt managed to stop him...

[medievalistsnet]

Prester John with Chris Taylor

A mysterious figure ruling at the fringes of the known world, Prester John might be the most famous person you’ve never heard of. Like a medieval Carmen Sandiego, Prester John was a man people searched the globe for, from Ethiopia, to Tibet, to the New World, never quite catching up to him in the end. So, who was Prester John and why were medieval people so keen to find him?

Listen here