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In considering the increasing interest in the study of a global Middle Ages , there seem to be few individuals , either fictional or actual , that had a more powerful cosmopolitan currency than the figure of Prester John and the legends surrounding his kingdom . As a product of cultural imaginings and questionably recounted historical events , the search for and legitimization of Prester John has commanded consistent interest , both popular and scholarly , almost continuously since first mention of the figure of John in 1145 . The now infamous Letter of Prester John , which details the magnificent Christian kingdom lying somewhere in the East , beyond the approaching threat of an ever -expanding Islam , has long catalyzed a hunt , by both adventurers and scholars , to seek the elusive patriarch . The very indeterminacy of the geographic location of Prester John allowed the European imagination to consequently imagine him everywhere precisely because he could neither be confirmed nor denied existence anywhere . This report will explore the ways that a reading of the Prester John legend reveals competing ambitions of enclosure and expansion within twelfth and thirteenth -century Latin Christendom , specifically around the time of the Fifth Crusade . This report will trace the ideational tensions within a presumed Christian Crusading West trying to legitimate itself against the dialectical buttress of what was increasingly professed as its heretical other , Islam . The Fifth Crusade , especially , seemed to hinge on the possibility of the harmonious convergence of Eastern and Western Christian powers , literalizing the sense of Christian enclosure around all of Islam . Prester John’s kingdom thus served two functions : first , to comprise the other half of the Christian enclosure , and secondly , to mark a phenomenological limit point of human experience that domesticated alterity under the banner of a sovereign priest -king . |
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