Name of a legendary Eastern priest and king. The mythical
journey to Rome of a certain Patriarch John of India in 1122,
and his visit to Callistus II, cannot have been the origin of
the legend. Not until much later, in a manuscript dating from
the latter part of the fifteenth-century "Tractatus
pulcherrimus" (Zarncke), do we find the patriarch and priest
united in one person. The first combination of the two legends
appears at the end of the twelfth century, in an apocryphal book
of devotions called the "Narrative of Eliseus". The first
authentic mention of Prester John is to be found in the
"Chronicle" of Otto, Bishop of Freising, in 1145. Otto gives as
his authority Hugo, Bishop of Gabala. The latter, by order of
the Christian prince, Raymond of Antioch, went in 1144 (after
the fall of Edessa) to Pope Eugene II, to report the grievous
position of Jerusalem, and to induce the West to send another
crusade. Otto met the Syrian prelate at Viterbo, where in the
pope's presence he learned that a certain John, who