Lost Lands, Forgotten Realms by Bob Curran

Author:Bob Curran [Curran, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-5404-2
Publisher: Career Press
Published: 2012-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

Political Presence

By now the figure of “Prester John” was becoming something of a political one. Desperate to gain and maintain a presence in the turbulent East, the Western Church began to play up the idea of a brave Christian king, holding out against the encroaching forces of Islam and Paganism. And if the Mongol Empire was not the ideal template for a Christian kingdom and a potential ally in the East, there were others. The French Crusader historian Jean de Joinville (c. 1225–1317), for instance, mentions several Christian missions to a number of Tartar kings, none of which appear to have been very successful. Some of the Tartar leaders seemed just as bloodthirsty as the Mongols, hardly the descendants of a wise and beneficent Christian ruler. Further medieval texts concerning the region, such as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville compiled between 1357 and 1371, detail an attempt to find this king, all of which resulted in failure. Among the Asian races, Prester John remained as elusive as ever.

In his travels in the East, the Italian explorer Marco Polo mentioned a county that he called Abascia in which he claimed there was a substantial Christian population whose needs were served by capable patriarchs. However, it is thought that he was referring to Abyssinia, where there were indeed substantial numbers of Christians and several churches overseen by patriarchs. His writings did nothing to explain the mystery.

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