“The idea” (says Colonel Yule)⁠[497] “that a Christian potentate of enormous wealth and power, and bearing this title, ruled over vast tracts in the far East, was universal in Europe from the middle of the twelfth to the end of the thirteenth century, after which time the Asiatic story seems gradually to have died away, whilst the Royal Presbyter was assigned to a locus in Abyssinia; the equivocal application of the term India to the East of Asia and the East of Africa facilitating this transfer. Indeed I have a suspicion, contrary to the view now generally taken, that the term may from the first have belonged to an Abyssinian Prince, though circumstances led to its being applied in another quarter for a time.

“Be that as it may, the inordinate report of Prester John’s magnificence became especially diffused from about the year 1165, when a letter full of the most extravagant details was circulated, which purported to have been addressed by this potentate to the Greek Emperor Manuel, the Roman Emperor Frederick, the Pope, and other Christian sovereigns. By the circulation of this letter, glaring fiction as it is, the idea of this Christian Conqueror was planted deep in the mind of Europe, and twined itself round every rumour of revolution in further Asia....”

The title of Prester John, borne by this semi-mythical Christian hero, was transmitted to his successors in Africa; and at the time when Holbein copied the name of his kingdom on to the globe of the “Ambassadors,” was the common appellation of David, King of Abyssinia.

Lord Herbert of Cherbury⁠[498] has a curious passage concerning this personage. In his narrative of the meeting that took place at Bologna between Charles V. and the Pope in the winter of 1532-33,⁠[499] he says:

“During this interview I find in our records a Portuguez in the name of David King of the Ethiopians (vulgarly called Prete Jan) presented himself Ambassador to his Holiness; for authorizing which Charge he brought with him not only Letters of Credence (translated out of the Chaldee to the Italian and Portugal tongues) wherein the said King declared himself to be descended from Queen Candace, mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, but a Crucifix of gold; the further effects of his employment being to require some excellent artificers and 2000 Arquebusiers whom he would use in a war against the Turk in Egypt, when his Holiness would compose the differences in Western Parts, and join all Christian Princes for recovery of the Holy Land; pretending thereupon in the name of that King to render obedience to the Pope as the true successor of St. Peter. But this (as Augustino de Augustini, an Italian there present, and sometimes servant to Cardinal Woolsey, hath it in his letter to Cromwell⁠[500]) made the rest suspected; and the rather that other circumstances made it probable, that this Ambassador was suborned partly by the Portugal to countenance his monopoly of spices towards those parts (much grudged by his neighbour Princes), and partly by the Pope to advance his authority and reputation.”