A Wind From the North by Ernle Bradford Page B

heathen and the infidel. In 1144 a Syrian bishop had told Bishop Otto of Freisinger that a great victory had recently been won over the infidels by a king called Prester John, who was a Christian ruler and the descendant of the Magi. It now seems likely that at one time there really was such a ruler somewhere in central Asia. He was a powerful khan, who had been converted by Nestorian Christian missionaries, and who was known as the “Presbyter Khan”—the Priest King. His son, who is reputed to have succeeded him, was attacked and overthrown by Genghis Khan toward the end of the twelfth century, which put an end to the Christian khanate in that part of the world.
    Inevitably, rumors of this Christian kingdom in Asia, which had reached Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, became inextricably confused with other rumors about the Christian kings of Abyssinia. In the fourteenth century a Franciscan friar, writing of Abyssinia and Nubia, says that “the Patriarch of these countries is Prester Juan who rules over many lands and cities of Christians.” He is also referred to by Marco Polo as ruling a kingdom somewhere near the Great Wall of China, while that old spinner of travelers’ tales, Sir John Mandeville, placed his kingdom in upper India.
    There is no smoke without fire, and we see now that medieval Christians in Europe were not so far from the truth when they believed that somewhere to the south and east there was a Christian king and country. Their hope was to establish communication with him, form an alliance against the heretic Mohammedans, and thus be able to take them in the rear. In this they were doomed to disappointment.
    The lure of Prester John was something that inevitably appealed to two sides of Prince Henry’s temperament. As grand master of the Order of Christ, he clearly had the duty to establish contact with this “lost” Christian ruler. It was practical politics for him, as a prince engaged in war against the Mohammedans, to try to establish a powerful alliance behind their backs. Prince Henry must have been further spurred in this quest when his brother Peter returned from his travels in 1428, bringing with him a copy of Marco Polo’s book, which the Venetians had given him.
    How often in his long conversations with travelers and seafarers Prince Henry must have heard that name, Prester John.
    The search for this long-dead, or nonexistent, monarch played as important a part in the history of navigation and discovery as the quest for the philosophers’ stone in the history of chemistry.

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    Henry was often alone these days. He was beginning his apprenticeship to the world of sea and silence. Below him in the bay a few ships drowsed at anchor. Around him lay the beginning of his palace, his fortress, and his naval base.
    “How many times did the rising sun find him seated where it had left him the day before, waking all the hours of the night, without a moment of rest, surrounded by people of many nationalities… . Where will you find another human body capable of supporting, as his in battle, the fatigue from which he had so little rest in time of peace! I truly believe that if strength could be represented, its very form would be found in the countenance and body of this prince. It was not only in certain things that he showed himself to be strong, but in all. And what strength is there greater than that of the man who is conqueror of himself?”
    The stern devotion to religious duties, which his mother had taught him, had disciplined him to long hours, and days even, of self-denial. As grand master of the Order of Christ he was dedicated to a chaste and ascetic life—but these were obligations that many a prince or nobleman would have taken lightly.
    In Henry they were as binding as his mother’s dying command, and the banked-up fires of sexuality provided the immense reserves of energy that astounded his fellow men. During those first months at Sagres he spent many a