Editing Prester John (section)

== Ethiopia ==
[[File:Prester John map.jpg|thumb|250px|A map of Prester John's kingdom as Ethiopia]]
Prester John had been considered the ruler of India since the legend's beginnings, but "India" was a vague concept to the medieval Europeans. Writers often spoke of the "[[Greater India|Three Indias]]", and lacking any real knowledge of the [[Indian Ocean]] they sometimes considered [[Ethiopia]] one of the three. Westerners knew that Ethiopia was a powerful Christian nation, but contact had been sporadic since the rise of Islam. No Prester John was to be found in Asia, so Europeans began to suggest that the legend was a reference to the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia.{{sfn|Silverberg|1972|pages=163–164}} Evidence has suggested that locating Prester John's kingdom in Ethiopia entered the collective consciousness around 1250.<ref name=":1">{{Cite book |title=A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 |author-last=Thornton| author-first=John K. |author-link=John Thornton (historian) |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2012 |isbn=9780521727341 |pages=16–17}}</ref>

[[Marco Polo]] had discussed Ethiopia as a magnificent Christian land{{sfn|Polo|Rustichello da Pisa|1930|pages=316–319}} and [[Eastern Orthodox Church|Orthodox Christians]] had a legend that the nation would one day rise up and invade [[Arabian Peninsula|Arabia]],{{sfn|Silverberg|1972|pages=176–177}} but they did not place Prester John there. In 1306, 30 Ethiopian ambassadors from Emperor [[Wedem Arad]] came to Europe, and Prester John was mentioned as the patriarch of their church in a record of their visit.{{sfn|Silverberg|1972|pages=164–165}} Another description of an African Prester John is in the ''Mirabilia Descripta'' of [[Dominican Order|Dominican]] missionary [[Jordan Catala|Jordanus]], around 1329. In discussing the "Third India", Jordanus records a number of fanciful stories about the land and its king, whom he says Europeans call Prester John.{{sfn|Jordanus|1863|p=42}}

[[File:Prester John of the Indies.jpg|thumb|"Preste Iuan de las Indias" (Prester John of the Indies) positioned in East Africa on a 16th-century Spanish [[Portolan chart]]]]
After this point, an African location became increasingly popular. This may have resulted from increasing ties between Europe and Africa as 1428 saw the [[Kingdom of Aragon|Kings of Aragon]] and Ethiopia actively negotiating the possibility of a strategic marriage between the two kingdoms.<ref name=":1" /> On 7 May 1487, two Portuguese envoys, [[Pêro da Covilhã]] and [[Afonso de Paiva]], were sent traveling secretly overland to gather information on a possible sea route to India, but also to inquire about Prester John. Covilhã managed to reach Ethiopia. Although well received, he was forbidden to depart. [[First contact (anthropology)|Contact]] for the purpose of finding allies, such as with Prester John increasingly fueled early European exploration and colonialism.<ref name="Knobler 2016 p. 70-71 ">{{cite book | last=Knobler | first=A. | title=Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration | publisher=Brill | series=European Expansion and Indigenous Response | year=2016 | isbn=978-90-04-32490-9 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ztKYDQAAQBAJ | access-date=2021-12-05 | pages=70–71}}</ref><ref name="Crotty">{{cite thesis | last=Crotty | first=Kenneth | title=The role of myth and representation in the origins of colonialism | publisher=Maynooth University | year=2004  | url=https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/5310/ | access-date=2021-12-05}}</ref> 

More envoys were sent in 1507, after the island of [[Socotra]] was taken by the Portuguese. As a result of this mission, and facing Muslim expansion, regent queen [[Eleni of Ethiopia]] sent ambassador [[Mateus (Ethiopia)|Mateus]] to king [[Manuel I of Portugal]] and to the pope, in search of a coalition. Mateus reached Portugal via [[Goa]], having returned with a Portuguese embassy, along with priest [[Francisco Álvares]] in 1520. Francisco Álvares's book, which included the testimony of Covilhã, the ''Verdadeira Informação das Terras do Preste João das Indias'' ("A True Relation of the Lands of Prester John of the Indies") was the first direct account of Ethiopia, greatly increasing European knowledge at the time, as it was presented to the pope, published and quoted by [[Giovanni Battista Ramusio]].<ref>{{cite book |author-last=Beckingham |author-first=C. F. |author-link=Charles Fraser Beckingham |contribution=Ethiopia and Europe 1200-1650 |pages=78–95 |title=The European Outthrust and Encounter: The First Phase c. 1400-c. 1700: Essays in Tribute to David Beers Quinn on His 85th Birthday |editor1-last=Clough |editor1-first=Cecil H. |editor2-last=Hair |editor2-first=P.E.H. |location=Liverpool |publisher=Liverpool University |date=1994 |url=https://archive.org/details/europeanoutthrus0000unse |access-date=2021-06-17 |isbn=0853232296}}</ref>

By the time Emperor [[Dawit II of Ethiopia|Lebna Dengel]] and the Portuguese had established diplomatic contact with each other in 1520, Prester John was the name by which Europeans knew the [[Emperor of Ethiopia]].{{sfn|Silverberg|1972|pages=188–189}} The Ethiopians, though, had never called their emperor that. When ambassadors from Emperor [[Zara Yaqob]] attended the [[Council of Florence]] in 1441, they were confused when Roman Catholic-led council prelates insisted that the Ethiopians should refer to themselves as representatives of their monarch Prester John. They tried to explain that nowhere in Zara Yaqob's list of regnal names did that title occur. However, their admonitions did little to stop Europeans from calling the King of Ethiopia Prester John.{{sfn|Silverberg|1972|p=189}} Some writers who used the title did understand it was not an indigenous honorific; for instance Jordanus seems to use it simply because his readers would have been familiar with it, not because he thought it authentic.{{sfn|Silverberg|1972|pages=166–167}}

Ethiopia has been claimed for many years as the origin of the Prester John legend, but most modern experts believe that the legend was simply adapted to fit that nation in the same fashion that it had been projected upon Ong Khan and Central Asia during the 13th century.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Salvadore |first=Matteo |date=2017 |section=Introduction |title=The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations |section-url=https://www.academia.edu/25983362|language=en |doi=10.4324/9781315612294 |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages=1–17|isbn=9781317045465 }}</ref> Modern scholars find nothing about Prester John or his country in the early material that would make Ethiopia a more suitable identification than any place else, and furthermore, specialists in Ethiopian history have effectively demonstrated that the story was not widely known there until the Portuguese began to circumnavigate around Africa, which is how they reached Ethiopia, via the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. [[Czech people|Czech]] Franciscan Remedius Prutky asked Emperor [[Iyasu II of Ethiopia|Iyasu II]] about this identification in 1751, and Prutky states that the man was "astonished, and told me that the kings of Abyssinia had never been accustomed to call themselves by this name." In a footnote to this passage, [[Richard Pankhurst (academic)|Richard Pankhurst]] states that this is apparently the first recorded statement by an Ethiopian monarch about this tale, and they were likely unaware of the title until Prutky's inquiry.{{sfn|Prutky|1991|p=115}}