Philip Marsden - The Chains of Heaven - An Ethiopian Romance

Seventy vassals paid Prester John tribute. Yet he also knew humility. He was waited on by kings, but he himself took the title merely of ’Prester’, or priest. When he rode out, a page carried before him a plain wooden cross to represent Christ’s Passion and a vase of soil to remind of his own mortality. His palace was roofed in ebony with windows of crystal. Each day, thirty thousand people sat to eat at tables of gold. The tables were supported on amethyst columns which could prevent drunkenness. In front of his palace was suspended a vast mirror in which the great and magnanimous ruler was able to see at once all that was happening in his kingdom.

Copies of Prester John’s letter were soon circulating the courts of Europe. Scores of translations were made. Manuscripts exist in Anglo-Norman, French, Serbian and Hebrew; five versions have been found in High German. A Welsh translation survives, one in Scots dialect and two different versions in Irish. The Russian translation stirred the thoughts of many a steppe adventurer, and the letter has left echoes in the bylina or folk ballad, Diuk Stepanovich. Prester John enters the Grail myth: as priest-king he was equated with the guardian of the Grail. Sir John Mandeville lifted details of his kingdom for the fictitious account of his own travels. The letter’s images of faith, power and wealth fill the verses of the Renaissance poet Ludovico Ariosto—he describes a mythical flight beyond the Muslim world to the glittering palace of Prester John. With the development of printing, the letter found an even wider public. In France it was in such demand that it went to fourteen editions.

For hundreds of years, Prester John and his kingdom occupied that now-vanished region where the known world recedes and the imaginary one begins. Early mappers like Cosmas Indicopleustes dealt with such places by imposing a satisfying symmetry: the fringes of his map are full of straight lines and right-angles. But in medieval Europe they knew better. The questing spirit of the age placed wonders beyond the horizon—utopias, lost countries, strange creatures, sacred mountains, paradisial kingdoms.

The letter of Prester John is a glorious fake. It is the work, in all likelihood, of a German monk. Like James Macpherson’s Ossian, it achieved popularity by fleshing out a collective fantasy—proof that literature is as adept at wishful thinking as it is at truth. Even as late as the sixteenth century, maps show the area of Ethiopia as the land of Prester John. Once placed in those imaginary regions, it is hard to return to earth.

The lure of Prester John was partly responsible for one of Europe’s most ambitious enterprises. When Henry the Navigator sent his fidalgos down the coast of Africa, he was hoping for an alliance with the great ruler. The Portuguese popular imagination had already been fed by the chapbook Libro del Infante Pedro de Portugal, which included a mythical visit to Prester John by the brother of Henry the Navigator.

The Portuguese weren’t the only ones hunting for Prester

John. A merchant from Ragusa or Dubrovnik, Vincenzo Matteo, was reported to be on his trail. The Dutch thought the Zambezi a possible route to the kingdom, and called it Prester John’s river. But it was the Portuguese who were the most dogged. In 1487 King John II despatched an envoy from Lisbon overland to find Prester John. He reached the Ethiopian court, the first recorded European to do so, but he never returned.

It is another Portuguese, Francisco Alvares, who gives us the earliest report of Prester John. In 1520 he and his party arrived in Ethiopia from Goa. After months of travelling they came to the king’s camp. They had to wait days for an audience. At last the summons came. They were shown in behind a set of curtains. Beyond these curtains were others, made of even finer cloth. Behind them was a room laid with beautiful carpets and a dais which was concealed behind a further set of curtains. When these were drawn back, there he was—King Lebna Dengel. On his head was a great crown of gold and silver, and in his hand was a silver cross. A veil of blue taffeta covered his mouth and beard, and his robes were of gold brocade.

Even so, Lebna Dengel and his mountain kingdom were something of a disappointment. The Ethiopians were clearly in no position to launch a crusade; they themselves were too busy trying to keep the khanates of the plains from invading. This Prester John was certainly Christian, but he was no saviour, and his people were frankly pretty poor.

The world lost a little of its colour. In Portugal, millennial enthusiasts transferred their hopes to Sebastianism, the cult of the conquering ascetic, the martyr-king Sebastian I who succeeded in returning from the dead on four separate occasions.

Not for the first time, nor the last, Ethiopia had helped give solid form to rumour. The Ethiopians themselves were as baffled then by this ’Prester John’ as they have been more recently by the Rastafarians’ elevation of Haile Selassie. In 1441, an Ethiopian delegation to Rome became quite irritated with their interviewers: ‘We are from Ethiopia. Our king is Zara Yaqob. Why do you call him Prester John?’

Before leaving the monastery of Yimrehanna Krestos we called in on Abba Gobeze—‘herbalist, wise teacher, old man’, according to the priest.

His hut was dark and hot. He was lying on his bed. He was gazing up into the corrugated iron roof. From a crossbeam of eucalyptus hung his clothes. He was in a good mood. His brother had come to see him from Lalibela and brought news and some medicine. His brother was not a monk but a priest, and he sat on a stool by his bed.

First on one elbow, then another, Abba Gobeze raised himself up. He glanced at me; he had wonderfully hooded eyes which, once seen, made you want to hear his every word. He stretched up his hand and from the beam above drew down a shirt.

‘Yimrehanna Krestos, he is a saint and a king, and also a priest.’ He spoke faintly. ‘Ethiopia is always the representative of God…Foreigners are now coming to Lalibela to learn…the whole world will learn from Ethiopia…’

He paused to arrange the shirt on his lap, and laughed at himself: ‘We monks, we are dead people. We have no physical life.’

His brother nodded proudly as if to say: He is a monk, you understand, a hero of the war between world and spirit.

Abba Gobeze put his hand-cross on the blanket. ‘Yes, we just hold our lives in our hand. Death is always close beside us.’

Death certainly did not seem far away for old Abba Gobeze. His body had little flesh on it. After doing up each button he paused to catch his breath. His shoulders rose with the effort. Once the shirt was on, he took down another. This one went on more quickly. He swung his legs down. They didn’t quite reach the floor, and he spent a moment looking at his toes.

‘Our bodies are nothing!’

Then he pulled down a jersey. He pulled down a pair of trousers and a belt. With each layer his strength increased. He ran his hand playfully through the remaining clothes. Most were rags, strips of torn green serge, corners of brown homespun. He took another pair of trousers and pulled them on over the first. He began to sing. ‘ Yejamarish inje yecharesech … dum-da-yesh…da-yesh…er… ’

His brother said, in a stage whisper: ‘He has been very unwell.’

Abba Gobeze couldn’t remember the rest of the song. ‘My brothers taught it to me. They went to the coronation of His Imperial Majesty. It was in Addis. I was too young to go.’

‘We were both too young to go,’ echoed his brother. ‘In fact, I wasn’t born.’

‘Are your family from this region?’ I asked.

‘Always from here!’ boomed Abba Gobeze. ‘Father was a priest, grandfather was a priest. All priests—’