The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Prester John tells in his Letter how he lives in a magnificent palace, with gates of sardonyx that give some kind of warning if anyone tries to introduce poison. He has a magic mirror that can show him what is going on anywhere in the land, and a fountain whose waters have the property of the Elixir of Life, and can keep a man looking thirty for ever. Prester John has a ring containing a precious stone that can make him invisible, and there follow descriptions of many other marvels: a sea of sand in which there are various edible fish, a river made of rolling stones, and worms called salamanders who can only live in fire – Prester John has robes made of their skin, and they can only be cleaned by holding them in fire. The country itself has no crime, falsehood or poverty – although, oddly enough, Prester John still feels it necessary to make war.

So it was understandable that Rusticiano became very excited when Marco Polo told him about a Christian potentate called Unc Can, which signified Prester John. Any fragment of gossip about Prester John guaranteed that a book would reach a wide audience.

Polo’s account sent many romantic travellers on the road to Samarkand and Kashgar in the century that followed publication of the travels. They never, of course, found Prester John. But this was not because Prester John never existed. Polo’s account of Prester John is, indeed, inaccurate – for example, he makes him Genghis Khan’s enemy and kills him off in a battle for the hand of a beautiful princess. In fact, Prester John was Genghis Khan’s closest friend and ally – Torghril, khan of the Kereits. The Kereits were Nestorian Christians, members of that heretical sect who believed that Christ was first and foremost a man, and who had been driven eastward into Asia in the early days of the established church.

The legends of Merlin and King Arthur, blown up to grotesque proportions by Geoffrey of Monmouth – a Welsh bishop – were largely responsible for that tradition of chivalry, of knights in armour wearing their lady’s kerchief on their helmets, that we regard as so typical of the Middle Ages. And the legend of Prester John, blowing like a spring breeze into that stagnating waxworks, was as important as the crusades in stirring the minds of men and making them dream of distant horizons. For once again, we must make an attempt to grasp an almost impossible concept: that there was a time when a man took it for granted that he would die in the same hovel in which he was born, and in which his great-great-grandfathers had died, and in which his great-great-grandsons would die in their turn. It was not that people had no ambition to better themselves; it was that they believed that the world was a perfectly stable and static place which would never change. Life was hard – but then, it was supposed to be, for man was expelled from Eden for Adam’s sin. Now, at least, that problem was solved; the Church would take care of everybody’s salvation, and guarantee an eternity of blissful relaxation. Meanwhile, reminders of death and mortality were everywhere. Beggars exhibited their deformities outside churches, lepers walked the streets in processions, sounding their rattles, criminals were gibbeted and burned in public, and rats waddled through the refuse in the street like pet cats and dogs. Every church had its tableau of the Dance of Death with its grim reaper. One result of all this was the famous ‘anonymity’ of medieval craftsmen. It strikes us as strange, and rather admirable, that there should be no signature on a beautiful rood screen or statue of the virgin and child; historians tell us that this is because the work was done solely for the greater glory of God, and we are suitably impressed. But everyone in the small community knew exactly who the craftsman was, and would be happy to mention his name to any visitor who happened to enquire. What they were not much concerned about was a visitor in a hundred years time, for ‘posterity’ was a concept that did not really exist. These people lived in the present; they knew practically nothing about yesterday. (Herodotus was not even translated into Latin until 1452.) Their apparent humility was simply another outcome of the waxworks mentality.

And it was at this point – say, around 1150 – that people began to whisper that the return of King Arthur was about to take place or that the pope had received a letter from an emperor called John the Priest, who could make himself invisible, and who possessed a magic mirror that could show him distant places – he might even be looking at them at this very moment, informed by spirits that he was being talked about… And the result must have been a frisson that was only partly superstitious terror; for the idea brought an intimation that interesting changes were in the air, like the first smell of spring. What no one could guess was that the changes, when they came, would be brought by hordes of trained killers who would leave behind deserted cities and headless corpses.

It was undoubtedly fortunate for Europe that Genghis Khan’s forces never reached farther than Poland. China and Russia were ravaged by the Mongols, eastern Europe by the Turks, then the Mongols. The Arabs – one of the most promising civilisations in the western world – were also devastated by Turks and Mongols. (Their own caliphs had a desire for wealth and display that was just as ruinous.) They had been the inventors of banking; but since Islam forbade usury, this was taken over by Christians and Jews. (And, as Christians began to look with increasing disfavour on usury, more and more by the Jews.) But after the Vikings had settled down, northern Europe was enviably stable. When the Mongols opened up the roads from Germany to China, it was the merchants and explorers of Europe who reaped the benefit. And the lure was romance as much as commerce – as late as 1488, Bartolomeu Dias set out to look for Prester John, and ended by discovering that it was possible to sail around the Cape of Good Hope.

The Church, as usual, remained blissfully unaware of these tremendous changes until too late. We can see, in retrospect, that ever since it became a political power, the Church had suffered from an exaggerated idea of its own importance. Instead of quietly trying to suffuse the people with its own ideas, like all the other great religions, it wanted to rule and give orders – that episode when St Ambrose had bullied the emperor Theodosius into public repentance for having seven thousand people killed in the circus had made every pope dream of humiliating earthly kings. The papacy’s two most spectacular successes were when Gregory VII excommunicated Henry IV of Germany and made him wait in the snow for three days to beg forgiveness, and when Innocent III – the greatest medieval pope – placed all England under interdict in 1209 and finally bullied King John – under threat of a crusade against him – to hand over England as a papal fief. (But all the pope’s objections to Magna Carta later failed to destroy it.) The execution of the boy Conradin, the last of the Staufer emperors, in 1268, seemed to prove that the Church could win any battle in the end. (It must have given the pope additional satisfaction that it took place in the square at Naples, where Frederick II, the ‘wonder of the world’, had founded a university to try to undermine the power of medieval superstition.)

In the year the Polos were making their way back from Cathay, a new pope was elected. Boniface VIII was a big, florid extrovert who was vain about his good looks and enjoyed drinking in low company; he preferred the dress of an emperor to papal vestments because he found it more becoming. Boniface enjoyed giving orders, and in 1290, before he was pope, told the assembled university of Paris that its teachings were trivial and poisonous, and that they were all forbidden to discuss such inflammatory subjects as the mendicant orders (like the Franciscans) in public or in private. To us it seems absurd to forbid anyone to discuss something in private; to the future Boniface VIII it came naturally.

It was power that interested Boniface. After the downfall of the Staufers, he saw no reason why he should not realise the dream of Gregory VII and become the true ruler of all Europe’s kings and emperors. Innocent III, we may recall – guardian of the young Frederick II – had persuaded the ‘wonder of the world’ to remit all taxes on the clergy; but Frederick went back on his word when he became emperor. Now Boniface decided it was time to try again, and in the year he became pope made the matter the subject of a bull. This was a papal edict (so called because of its ball-like seal – Latin word was preferred because to refer to papal balls would obviously give rise to misunderstanding), and it was regarded as un-contradictable. No priest, said Clericis Laicos, could be taxed without direct permission of the pope.