A History of Magic and Experimental Science, Volume 2 (of 2) / During the First Thirteen Centuries of Our Era

by Lynn Thorndike

CHAPTER XLVII

PRESTER JOHN AND THE MARVELS OF INDIA

Medieval notions of the marvels of India—India’s real contribution to knowledge—The legend of Prester John—Miracles of the Apostle Thomas—Otto of Freising on Prester John—Prester John’s letter to the Emperor Manuel—Marvels recounted by Prester John—Additional marvels in later versions—The letter of Pope Alexander III—Philip, the papal physician.

Medieval notions of the marvels of India.

In a twelfth century manuscript at Berlin a treatise on precious stones and their medicinal and other marvelous virtues which is ascribed to St. Jerome,[722] opens with a prologue describing a voyage to India, the home of the carbuncle, emerald, and other gems, and the land of mountains of gold guarded by dragons, griffins, and other monsters. According to this prologue the navigation of the Red Sea is extremely dangerous and takes six months, while another full year is required to cross the ocean to India and the Ganges.

India was still a distant land of wonders and home of magic to the minds of medieval men, as it had been in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, and as even to-day many westerners are credulous concerning its jugglers, fakirs, yogis, and theosophists. So William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris, writing in the first half of the thirteenth century, states that feats of magic are very seldom wrought in the Europe of his time. For one thing, as Origen and other early church fathers had already explained, the demons since the coming of Christ to earth had largely ceased their magical activities in Christian lands. But another reason was that the materials for working natural magic, the gems and herbs and animals with marvelous virtues, were seldom found in European lands. In India and other countries adjacent to it, on the contrary, such materials were abundant. Hence natural magic still flourished there and it was a land of many experimenters and of skilful marvel-workers.[723] Similarly Albertus Magnus, discussing the marvelous powers of astrological images, states that the best gems upon which to engrave them are those from India.[724] Costa ben Luca says in his work on physical ligatures that doctors in India are firm believers in the efficacy of incantations and adjurations; and about 1295 Peter of Abano speaks in his Phisionomia of the wise men of India as prolix on astrological themes. Medieval geomancies, too, often claim a connection with India.[725]

India’s real contribution to knowledge.

It should also be kept in mind, however, that medieval men believed that they derived from India learning which seems to us even to-day as sound and useful as it did to them then; for example, the Hindu-Arabic numerals.[726] Leonardo of Pisa, the great arithmetician of the early thirteenth century, tells us in the preface to his Liber Abaci[727] how, summoned as a boy to join his father who was a customs official at a trading station in Algeria, he was introduced to the art of reckoning “by a marvelous method through the nine figures of the Indians.” Thus we see that India’s marvels were not always false. Later he traveled in Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily, and Provence and studied their various methods of reckoning, but vastly preferred the Indian method to all others, returned to a more intensive study of it, and developed it further by additions from Euclid and contributions of his own. Not always, it is true, were medieval mathematicians as favorable to Indian methods as this. Jordanus Nemorarius in one passage characterizes an Indian theorem as “nothing but mere credulity without demonstration.”[728] But to return to the natural marvels of India.

The legend of Prester John.

In the extraordinary accounts of Prester John,[729] which are first met in the twelfth century and were added to with succeeding centuries and which had great currency from the start, as the number of extant manuscripts shows, the natural marvels of India vie in impressiveness and wonderment with the power of Prester John himself and with the miracles of the Apostle Thomas.

Miracles of the Apostle Thomas.

Odo, Abbot of St. Rémy from 1118 to 1151, states in a letter in response to the inquiry of a Count Thomas what had happened when he was recently in Rome. Byzantine ambassadors introduced to the pope an archbishop of India who had already had the extraordinary and disconcerting experience of having to return a third time to Constantinople for a new prince for his country, each previous Byzantine nominee having died on his hands. This archbishop said that the body of the Apostle Thomas was preserved in his country in a church rich in treasure and ornaments and surrounded by a river fordable only at the time of the saint’s festival. On that solemn occasion the Apostle’s body was shown to believers and the Apostle would raise his arm and open his hand to receive their gifts, but close it and refuse to receive any gift offered by a heretic. When this tale reached the pope’s ears he forbade the archbishop to disseminate such falsehoods further under pain of anathema, but the archbishop finally convinced the pope by taking an oath on the holy gospels.

Another longer and anonymous account has come down from manuscripts going back to the twelfth century of the visit of a Patriarch John of India to Rome under Pope Calixtus II (1119-1124). It is this account which is often joined in the manuscripts and early printed editions with the Letter of Prester John of which we shall presently speak. In this account the Patriarch John told “of memorable matters of his Indian region that were unknown to the Romans,” such as of the gold and gems in the river Physon which flows from Paradise, “but especially of the miracles of the most holy Apostle Thomas.” Without going into further details, such as that of the miraculous balsam lamp, which differ a good deal from Odo’s account, it may be noted that in this account the Apostle’s hand ministers the Eucharist to believers and refuses it to infidels and sinners.

Otto of Freising on Prester John, the descendant of the Magi.

We have progressed from an archbishop of India to a Patriarch John; we now come to Prester John the monarch. The historian, Otto of Freising, learned in 1145 from a Syrian bishop at Rome of a great victory recently gained over the Moslems by “a certain John who lived beyond Persia and Armenia in the extreme East, a king and priest, since he was a Christian by race but a Nestorian ... Prester John, for so they are wont to call him.” He was of the ancient progeny of the Magi mentioned in the Gospel, ruled the same races as they, and enjoyed such glory and abundance that he was said to use only an emerald scepter. After his victory he would have come to the aid of the crusaders at Jerusalem, but could not cross the Tigris, although he marched north along its eastern bank and waited for some years in the hope that it would freeze over.[730]

Prester John’s letter to the Emperor Manuel.

This Prester John was to be heard from again, however, for in the same century there appeared a letter purporting to have been written by him to the Byzantine Emperor, Manuel (1143-1180).[731] It is in this letter that the natural and artificial marvels of India and adjacent territories—Prester John’s dominion reaches from farther India to the Babylonian desert—are especially recorded. This letter even in its earliest and briefest form seems without doubt a western forgery and bears the marks of its Latin origin, [732] since despite the use of a few Greek ecclesiastical and official terms[733] and the attempt to rehearse unheard-of wonders, the writer indulges in a sneer at Greek adoration of the emperor[734] and is unable to conceive of Prester John except as a feudal overlord[735] with the usual kings, dukes and counts, archbishops, bishops and abbots under him. The letter then is of value chiefly as showing us what ideas prevailed concerning India and the orient in the Latin world of the twelfth and succeeding centuries, for the letter received many additions and variations, was translated into the vernacular languages, and appeared in print before 1500.[736] In the following account of its contents, however, I shall try to describe the letter as it existed in the twelfth century, after which I shall mention what seem to be interpolations of the thirteenth or later centuries.

Marvels recounted by Prester John.

But while different copies of the work vary, all have the same general character. Prester John tells what a mighty and Christian potentate he is and describes his marvelous palaces and contrivances or the natural marvels, strange beasts and serpents, monstrous races of men, potent herbs, stones, and fountains, to be found in the lands owning his sway. In one province is the herb assidios which enables its bearer to rout an impure spirit and force him to disclose his name and whence he comes. “Wherefore impure spirits in that land dare not take possession of anyone.”[737] A fountain flows from Mount Olympus not three days’ journey from Paradise whence Adam was expelled. Three draughts from it taken fasting insure one henceforth from all infirmity, and however long one may live, one will seem henceforth but thirty years of age.[738] Then there are some little stones which eagles often bring to Prester John’s territories and which worn on the finger preserve or restore the sight, or if consecrated with a lawful incantation, make one invisible and dispel envy and hatred and promote concord.[739] After a description of a sea of sand in which there are various kinds of edible fish and a river of stones, Prester John soon mentions the worms which in his language are called salamanders, who cannot live except in fire, and from whose skins he has robes made which can be cleansed only by fire.[740] After some boasting concerning the absence of poverty, crime, and falsehood in his country and about the pomp and wealth with which he goes forth to war, Prester John then comes to the description of his palace, which is similar to that which the Apostle Thomas built for Gundaphorus, King of India. Its gates of sardonyx mixed with cornu cerastis (horn of the horned serpents) prevent the secret introduction of poison; a couch of sapphire keeps John chaste; the square before the palace where judicial duels are held is paved with onyx “in order that the courage of the fighters may be increased by the virtue of the stone.”[741] Near this square is a magic mirror which reveals all plots in the provinces subject to Prester John or in adjacent lands.[742] In some manuscripts of the twelfth century is a description of another palace which before Prester John’s birth his father was instructed in a dream to build for his son. One feature of it is that no matter how hungry one may be on entering it, he always comes out feeling as full as if he had partaken of a sumptuous banquet.[743]

Additional marvels in later versions.

To such marvels in the early versions of the Letter of Prester John were added others in the course of the thirteenth century and later middle ages:—the huge man-eating ants who mined gold by night;[744] the land where men lived on manna, a substance which we shall find somewhat similarly mentioned by Michael Scot and Thomas of Cantimpré;[745] the tale, which we shall also hear from Roger Bacon, of men who tame flying dragons by their incantations and magic, saddle and bridle them, and ride them through the air;[746] the five marvelous stones that froze or heated or reduced to an even state of temperature or made light or dark everything within a radius of five miles; the second five stones, of which two were unconsecrated and turned water to milk or wine, while three were consecrated and would respectively cause fish to congregate, wild beasts to follow one, and, sprinkled with hot lion’s blood, produce a conflagration which could only be quenched by sprinkling the stone with hot dragon’s blood;[747] the marvelous mill operated by the occult virtue of the stone adamant;[748] the wonderful tree on which the wonderful healing apple grew;[749] the marvelous chapel of glass, always just big enough for as many persons as entered it;[750] and the stone and the fountain that served as fireless heaters.[751] In another case a marvel is wrought by stone and fountain combined. Two old men guard a large stone and admit to its hollow only Christians or those who desire to become Christians. If this profession of faith is genuine, the water in the hollow which is usually only four fingers deep thrice rises above the head of the person admitted, who thereupon emerges recovered from all sickness.[752]

The letter of Pope Alexander III.

How real Prester John was to the men of the twelfth century may be seen from the fact that Pope Alexander III on September 27, 1177, addressed from the Rialto in Venice a letter to him or to some actual eastern potentate whom he had confused with him.[753] The Pope does not expressly mention Prester John’s letter to Manuel but says that he has heard of him from many persons and common report, and more especially from “Master Philip, our friend and physician,” who had talked “with great and honourable men of your kingdom,” by whom he had been informed of their ruler’s desire for a church and altar at Jerusalem. It is this Philip whom the Pope now sends with his letter to Prester John and to instruct him in the doctrine of the Roman church. But it is a long and laborious journey involving many hardships and vicissitudes and the traversing of many countries with barbarous and unknown languages.

Philip, the papal physician.

Whether Philip ever succeeded in delivering the letter is not known and he has himself been regarded as a mysterious personage of whom nothing further was known.[754] I would suggest, however, that, as he seems to have been conversant with Syria and the Holy Land, he may have been the Philip of whose translation of the Secret of Secrets of the Pseudo-Aristotle we shall treat in the next chapter, a work which he found in Antioch and dedicated to the bishop of Tripoli. Or, if we do not meet this particular Philip again, we shall find in close relations with other popes other physicians whose names are prominent in the natural and occult science of the age.

[722] Berlin 956, 12th century, fols. 24-25.

[723] Gulielmi Alverni ... Opera Omnia, 1591, p. 1003, De universo, II, iii, 23.

[724] Mineral. II, iii, 4.

[725] One condemned at Paris in 1277 began, “The Indians have believed....”; two in a Harleian MS 2404 are called Indeana; a third, part Latin and part French, in Sloane MS 314 of the 15th century, opens, “This is the Indyana of Gremmgus which is called the daughter of astronomy and which one of the sages of India wrote.” See also CU Magdalene 27 (F. 4. 27, Haenel 23), late 14th century, fols. 72-88, “Hec est geomentia Indiana que vocatur filia Ast ... quam fecit unius (sic) sapientum Indie....”

[726] See D. E. Smith and L. C. Karpinski, The Hindu-Arabic Numerals, Boston, 1911; S. R. Benedict, A Comparative Study of the Early Treatises introducing into Europe the Hindu Art of Reckoning, Concord, 1914; L. C. Karpinski, “Two Twelfth Century Algorisms,” Isis, III (1921) 396-413. For “newly discovered evidence showing that the Hindu numerals were known to and justly appreciated by the Syrian writer Severus Sebokht, who lived in the second half of the seventh century,” see F. Nau in Journal asiatique, 1910, and J. Ginsburg, “New Light on our Numerals,” in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, XXIII (1917) 366-9. On the question of the debt of Arabic algebra to India, especially in the case of Muhammad. b. Musa al-Hwarazmi, who was also an astrologer, see J. Ruska Zur ältesten arabischen Algebra und Rechenkunst, in Sitzb. d. Heidelberger Akademie d. Wiss. Philos. hist. Klasse, 1917.

[727] Scritti di Leonardo Pisano, vol. I, 1857.

[728] Jordani Nemorarii Geometria vel De triangulis libri IV, ed. M. Curtze, Thorn, 1887, pp. 43-44.

[729] A good brief summary of the results of d’Avezac, Zarncke, and others will be found in Sir Henry Yule’s article on “Prester John,” EB. For the various texts to be here considered, with later interpolations and additions distinguished, see Friedrich Zarncke, Der Priester Johannes, in Abhandl. d. Kgl. Sächs. Gesells. d. Wiss. VII (1879), 627-1030; VIII (1883) 1-186.

[730] In Yule (1903) I, 231-7, Cordier discusses whether this monarch was Gurkhan of Kara Khitai (as urged by d’Avezac and Oppert) who “in 1141 came to the aid of the King of Khwarizmi against Sanjar, the Seljukian sovereign of Persia, ... and defeated that prince with great slaughter,” or whether he was “John Orbelian ... for years the pride of Georgia and the hammer of the Turks” (as urged by Professor Bruun of Odessa).

[731] For its text, with interpolations distinguished from the original text, see Zarncke (1879) 909-924. Some of the passages which Zarncke regards as interpolations are, however, already found in 12th century MSS. On the other hand, his text does not include all the interpolations and variations to be found even in the MSS which he describes. For instance, in BN 6244A, fol. 130r, just before the description of the herb assidios, occurs a passage which may be translated as follows: “You should know also that in our country we do not need doctors, for we have precious stones, herbs, fountains, and trees of so great virtue that they prevail against every infirmity and against poisons and wounds. And we have books which instruct us and distinguish between the potencies and virtues of the herbs.” In this MS Prester John is also more voluble on the theme of his devotion to the Christian faith than appears in Zarncke’s text, and (fols. 127v-128r) repeats the story of the administration of the Eucharist by the hand of the body of the Apostle Thomas. Zarncke lists about one hundred MSS of the letter but fails to use or mention any of those in the Bodleian Library where, for instance, Digby 158, fols. 2r-5v, is of the twelfth century. Another twelfth century MS not in his list is Paris Arsenal 379A, fol. 34. Zarncke also does not list the MSS of the letter at Madrid and Wolfenbüttel.

[732] In many MSS. nothing is said of its being a translation or when or by whom it was translated; others state that it was translated into Greek and Latin, or, in at least one case, from Arabic into Latin. Only from the thirteenth century on, I think, is Christian, Archbishop of Mainz, sometimes said to have translated it from Greek into Latin. Often it is simply stated that Manuel transmitted the letter to the Emperor Frederick, to whom also it is sometimes represented as sent direct by Prester John. Sometimes it is to the Pope to whom the letter comes from Manuel or Prester John.

The statement that Manuel transmitted the letter to the Emperor Frederick makes one wonder whether Anselm, Bishop of Havelberg and later of Ravenna, can have had anything to do with it. He was sent by Frederick on an embassy to Manuel in 1153, which seems to identify him with the author of a “Liber de diversitate nature et persone proprietatumque personalium non tam Latinorum quam ex Grecorum auctoritatibus extractus”—CUL 1824 (Qi. vi. 27), beautiful 13th century hand, fols. 129-76,—who states in his preface that he collected his Greek authorities in Constantinople where he was sent by Frederick on an embassy to Manuel, and on his return to Germany showed them to “Petro venerabili Tusculano episcopo.”

[733] Such as Apocrisarius and Archimandrite, a word however not entirely unknown in the west; see Ducange.

[734] “Cum enim hominem nos esse cognoscamus, te Graeculi tui Deum esse existimant, cum te mortalem et humanae corruptioni subiacere cognoscamus,” Zarncke (1879) 910.

[735] For instance, the writer twice alludes to the square before Prester John’s palace where he watches the combatants in judicial duels or wager of battle, Zarncke (1879) 918, 919.

[736] I have seen a copy in the British Museum (IA.8685), De Mirabilibus Indiae, where the account given Calixtus II of miracles of the Apostle Thomas is run together with the letter of Prester John.

[737] Zarncke, 912; Digby 158, fol. 2v; BN 2342, fol. 191v; BN 3359, fol. 144v.

[738] Zarncke, 912-913; MSS as before. This fountain of youth was little improved upon by another inserted later (Zarncke, 920-21; BN 3359, fol. 146v; not in the other two MSS), which one had to taste thrice daily on a fasting stomach for three years, three months, three weeks, three days, and three hours, in order to live and remain youthful for three hundred years, three months, three weeks, three days, and three hours.

[739] Zarncke, 913; Digby 158, fol. 3r, etc.

[740] Zarncke, 915; Digby 158, fol. 3v; BN 2342, fol. 192r; BN 3359, fol. 145r. It will be recalled that Charlemagne is said to have had such a garment. Pliny discussed both salamanders and asbestos but did not connect the two. Marco Polo, however, says (I 42, Yule (1903) I, 212-3), “The real truth is that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our part of the world, but is a substance found in the earth.... Everybody must be aware that it can be no animal’s nature to live in fire, seeing that every animal is composed of all four elements.” Polo confirms, however, the report of robes made of incombustible mineral fibre and cleansed by fire.

[741] Zarncke, 918; Digby 158, fol. 4r; BN 2342, fol. 192r; BN 3359, fol. 145v.

[742] Zarncke, 919-20; Digby 158, fols. 4v-5r; BN 2342, fol. 192v; BN 3359, fol. 146r.

[743] Zarncke, 920-22; Digby 158 fol. 5v; BN 2342, fol. 192v; BN 3359, fol. 146r-v.

[744] Zarncke, 911.

[745] Ibid., 913. For Michael Scot, see Chapter 51, page 324; for Thomas of Cantimpré, Chapter 53, Page 393.

[746] Zarncke, 913. For Roger Bacon, see Chapter 61, page 657.

[747] Zarncke, 915-16.

[748] Ibid., 918-19.

[749] Zarncke, 921.

[750] Ibid., 922.

[751] Ibid., 923.

[752] Ibid., 914.

[753] Text of the letter in Zarncke, 941-44.

[754] Zarncke, 945, “Der Philippus, den der Papst seinen familiaris nennt, ist bis jetzt nicht nachgewiesen.”