ABSTRACT
Prester John’s translocation from Asia to Africa is often misunderstood. Early modern writers accused the Portuguese missionaries Pêro da Covilhã and Afonso de Paiva of being the first to associate Prester John with Ethiopia, but there are many indications before their mission of 1487 that Europeans already considered Prester John to be equivalent to the Ethiopian monarch. There exist at least eight letters prior to 1487 from European kings and popes to the Ethiopian emperor, calling him Prester John. 1 The earliest text known to mention Prester John in Ethiopia is a map which dates to more than a century and a half earlier than Pêro da Covilha’s mission: the map of Giovanni da Carignano, dated c.1310, which was destroyed in the Second World War. 2 The earliest textual sources to definitively place Prester John in Ethiopia are from the 1320s/1330s, and another map of the 1330s also places him in Ethiopia, although it has been suggested that Jacques de Vitry may have associated Prester John with Ethiopia as early as 1217. 3
