How great was the popularity and diffusion of this letter may be judged in some degree from the fact that Zarncke in his treatise on Prester John gives a list of close on loo mss. of it. Of these there are 8 in the British Museum, 1 o at Vienna, 13 in the great Paris library, 15 at Munich. There are also several renderings in old German verse.
The only other surviving document of the i 2th century bearing on this subject is a letter of which ms. copies are preserved in the Cambridge and Paris libraries, and which is also included in mediaeval chronicles. It is a letter purporting to be written by Pope Alexander III. on Sept. 22, 1177, to carissimo in Christo filio Johanni, illustro et magnifico indorum regi, of whom he had heard from his physician Philip.
There is no express mention of the title "Prester John" in what seem the more genuine copies of this letter. But the address and a warning against a boastful spirit appear to indicate that the pope supposed himself to be addressing the author of the letter of 1165. In 1221 a rumour came out of the East that a great Christian con queror was taking the hated Muslims in reverse and sweeping away their power. The name ascribed to the conqueror was David, and some called him the son or the grandson of Prester John of India. The conqueror was in fact the famous Jenghiz Khan : but the delusion was dissipated slowly.
European travellers in Asia looked for a prince to whom the legend of Prester John could be attached. Carpini (1248) makes him the king of the Christians of India the Greater ; Rubruquis (1253) gives the title of "King John" to Kushluk, king of the Naimans, and makes him a brother of Ung Khan (d. 1203), the ally of Jenghiz. In Marco Polo's narrative "Unc Khan," alias Prester John, is the lord of the Tatars up to the advent of Jenghiz Khan. This story is repeated by other writers. Both Marco Polo and Friar John of Montecorvino speak of the descendants of Prester John as holding territory in the plain of Kuku-Khotan (about 30o miles north-west of Peking). Friar Odoric gives a cir cumstantial account of this kingdom, and with this Prester John disappears from Asia to figure in African legend.
It is indeed probable that, however vague may have been the ideas of Pope Alexander III. respecting the geographical position of the potentate whom he addressed from Venice in 1177, the only real person to whom the letter can have been sent was the king of Abyssinia. The "honourable persons of the monarch's kingdom" whom the leech Philip had met with in the East must have been the representatives of some real power, and not of a phantom. It must have been a real king who professed to desire reconciliation with the Catholic Church and the assignation of a church at Rome and of an altar at Jerusalem. Moreover, we know
that the Ethiopic Church did long possess a chapel and altar in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and, though we have been unable to find travellers' testimony to this older than about it is quite possible that the appropriation may have originated much earlier. We know from Marco Polo that about a century after the date of Pope Alexander's epistle a mission was sent by the king of Abyssinia to Jerusalem to make offerings on his part at the Church of the Sepulchre; and it is extremely likely that the princes of the "Christian families" who had got possession of the throne of northern Abyssinia should have wished to strengthen themselves by a connection with European Christendom, and to establish relations with Jerusalem, then in Christian hands.
From the 14th century onwards Prester John had found his seat in Abyssinia. It is there that Fra Mauro's great map presents a fine city with the rubric, "Qui it Preste Janni fa resi dentia principal." When, nearer the end of the century (1481- 1495), King John II. of Portugal was prosecuting inquiries re garding access to India his first object was to open communication with "Prester John of the Indies," who was understood to be a Christian potentate in Africa. And when Vasco da Gama went on his voyage from Mozambique northwards he began to hear of "Preste Joham" as reigning in the interior—or rather, probably, by the light of his preconceptions of the existence of that per sonage in East Africa he thus interpreted what was told him. More than twenty years later, when the first book on Abyssinia was composed—that of Alvarez—the title designating the king of Abyssinia is "Prester John," or simply "the Preste." BIBLIOGRAPHY.-For the older aspects of the subject, see Ludolf's His toria Aethiopica and its Commentary, passim. The excellent remarks of M. d'Avezac, comprising a conspectus of almost the whole essence of the subject, are in the Recueil de voyages et de memoires pub lished by the Societe de Geographic, iv. 547-564 (Paris, 1839). Two German works of importance which have been used in this article are the interesting and suggestive Der Presbyter Johannes in Sage and Geschichte, by Dr. Gustav Oppert (2nd ed., Berlin, 187o), and, most important of all in its learned, careful and critical collection and discussion of all the passages bearing on the subject, Der Priester Johannes, by Friedrich Zarncke of Leipzig (1876-79) . See also Sir H. Yule's Cathay and the Way Thither, p. 173 seq., and in Marco Polo (2nd ed.), i. 229-233, ii.