The European Opportunity by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Author:Felipe Fernández-Armesto [Fernández-Armesto, Felipe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781315239859
Google: -11LzAEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-01-15T01:37:43+00:00

9

The Quest for Prester John

C.F. Beckingham

FEW1 scholars can have taken greater delight in discovering historical facts than did John Boyle. He endeavoured above all to ascertain exactly what had happened, and to identify as precisely as possible the place and date of events and the persons involved in any incident. It was this quality which made him such a superb commentator on the Persian histories, to the study and interpretation of which he devoted so much of his energies with such impressive results. There have been other scholars with whom he shared this characteristic, his teacher Minorsky, for instance. But Boyle joined to this, unusually, an affection for legends, and an appreciation of the way in which they develop under the influence of changing conditions as they pass from one century or one people to another, and of how they in their turn may influence events. Very few men have derived more enjoyment at once from factual and from legendary history. Today I propose to speak about a legend which he did something to elucidate, which has had an immense influence on history, especially on the history of geographical discovery, and which affords a remarkable example of the courage and persistence of men in seeking evidence for something in which they would like to believe.

1 The text of a lecture delivered by Professor Beckingham at Manchester University on 31 October 1979 in memory of Professor John Andrew Boyle.

Among the historical episodes which Boyle has helped us to understand better is the struggle for power which took place among the tribes of Mongolia at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century, which eventuated in the supremacy of Chingiz Khan over the whole people. His principal rival in this conflict, who was eventually defeated and killed, was a man whom the European travellers of the thirteenth century, William of Rubruck and Marco Polo, call Unc or Unc Gin. In a characteristically concise and informative note to his translation of Juvaini Boyle remarks that Unc is intended to represent the Mongol pronunciation of Wang, a title conferred upon him by the Chinese emperor, that his personal name was To'oril, and that he was the Khan of the Kereit, a tribe which was then Christian though of the Nestorian persuasion. It was this last fact that persuaded Marco Polo to identify him with Prester John, the mysterious priest and emperor, of prodigious wealth, power and sanctity, who was believed to rule over 72 subordinate kings and an enormous but vaguely located territory somewhere on the other side of the Saracens. Polo's identification enjoyed great success. As late as the middle of the sixteenth century, when Prester John had long been the name by which the Emperor of Ethiopia was usually known in Europe, we find the sober Portuguese historian Castanheda saying that the real Prester John was the one of whom Marco Polo spoke, who had reigned in the hinterland of India, and whose territory had adjoined that of the

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