THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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different way, the Saturn­ and Christ­kingdom of the so­called Prester John.
In any case it was not important for either merchants or knights to retire to a lonely island. They were in search of riches and broad profitable land, neither of which lay
in Niflheim but on the way to the Holy Sepulchre and beyond. But Franconian power was dangerously threatened there a few decades after the capture of Jerusalem, a
second crusade had failed, and a third was uneasily and uncertainly being prepared. This atmosphere saw the arrival of three mysterious letters around 1165, they
allegedly came from Asia, from a powerful Christian ruler. He modestly called himself Presbyter John, but praised in an arrogant and bragging tone the power and
marvels of his state, the greatest on the earth. According to the letters, his kingdom extended eastwards ‘to the rising of the sun’, westwards ‘to the Tower of Babel’. A
tremendous ally thus seemed to arise against the Saracens, the gift from heaven of a second front in the east. The letters were addressed to Pope Alexander III, to
Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and to the Byzantine Emperor Manuel; the two emperors seem to have mistrusted the message, the Pope rather less so, because he
answered it, even if it was rather late. He sent his personal physician Philip, who had a good knowledge of the Orient, as a special envoy to Prester John, the lord of
India, the lord of a kingdom which, as the message said, enclosed the earthly paradise; a legation was sent off to a phantom. The text of the papal reply has survived,
dated Venice, the 27th September 1177, twelve years after receiving the Indian message; from which delay it is clear that the Pope's initially slight faith in the priest­king
had grown along with the Saracen threat itself. For the people, Prester John was a certainty long before this; his letter was widely circulated in various copies, it was
translated into French, German, and even Hebrew, and Europe bowed before the new hope of Asia. The papal reply was addressed: ‘Carissimo in Christo filio illustri
et magnifico Indorum regi, sacerdotum sanctissimo’;* though Philip, the bearer, was not even able to report that the marvellous kingdom was nowhere to be found, for
he never returned to Rome, the expedition was lost without trace. Hence the letter of the alleged priest­king was kept thoroughly topical, as far as its contents were
concerned; it speculated not only with the military interest of a third crusade, as noted above, but also with the fables and wishful images of the East that were going
round, and thus with the actual geographical utopia of the Middle Ages. If the legend of St Brendan had clung to the Isle of the Blest, in a western direction, the new
message clung to the legend of Alexander
* ‘Dearest brother in Christ, illustrious and magnificent King of the Indians, most blessed priest.’