Download or read book The Realm of Prester John written by Robert Silverberg and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Silverberg, whose work is well known to science fiction fans, originally published The Realm of Prester John in 1972. The first modern account of the genesis of a great medieval myth -- which was perpetuated for centuries by European Christians who looked to Asia and Africa for a strong ruler out of the east -- Silverberg's romantic and fabulous tale is now available in paperback for the first time.
Download or read book Prester John written by John Buchan and published by House of Stratus. This book was released on 2011-12-11 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After his father's death, our young hero sets off to make his fortune in South Africa. He gets tangled up in an African tribal uprising and a strange encounter and rumours he hears make him suspect that his destination may not be as predictable as he has supposed. Set at the turn of the last century, this is a riveting adventure story.
Download or read book The Realm of Prester John written by Robert Silverberg and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-04 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this modern account of the genesis of a great medieval myth, celebrated science fiction author Robert Silverberg’s explores the mysterious origins of Prester John, the astonishing Christian potentate of the East. Prester John was a legendary figure who cast a powerful spell over Latin Christendom for almost five centuries. Rumors of the warrior-king-prelate’s fabulous realms first reached Europe in the eleventh century and quickly assumed an exalted status alongside such fabled wonders as El Dorado, The Fountain of Youth, and the Holy Grail. The defeat of a Moslem Turkish tribe by a Buddhist Chinese warlord seems to have been the unlikely historical nugget around which the Prester John myth grew, but contributions to this strange saga have also been traced all around the globe to the Apostle Thomas' apocryphal preaching in India, to the actual existence of small colonies of Nestorian schismatics in central Asia, and even to Genghis Khan.
Download or read book Prester John The Legend and its Sources written by Keagan Brewer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legend of Prester John has received much scholarly attention over the last hundred years, but never before have the sources been collected and coherently presented to readers. This book now brings together a fully-representative set of texts setting out the many and various sources from which we get our knowledge of the legend. These texts, spanning a time period from the Crusades to the Enlightenment, are presented in their original languages and in English translation (for many it is the first time they have been available in English). The story of the mysterious oriental leader Prester John, ruler of a land teeming with marvels who may come to the aid of Christians in the Levant, held an intense grip on the medieval mind from the first references in twelfth-century Crusader literature and into the early-modern period. But Prester John was a man of shifting identity, being at different times and for different reasons associated with Chingis Khan and the Mongols, with the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, with China, Tibet, South Africa and West Africa. In order to orient the reader, each of these iterations is explained in the comprehensive introduction, and in the introductions to texts and sections. The introduction also raises a thorny question not often considered: whether or not medieval audiences believed in the reality of Prester John and the Prester John Letter. The book is completed with three valuable appendices: a list of all known references to Prester John in medieval and early modern sources, a thorough description of the manuscript traditions of the all-important Prester John Letter, and a brief description of Prester John in the history of cartography.
Download or read book The Travels of Sir John Mandeville written by John Mandeville and published by Wyatt North Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2020-01-27 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville is the chronicle of the alleged Sir John Mandeville, an explorer. His travels were first published in the late 14th century, and influenced many subsequent explorers such as Christopher Columbus.
Download or read book The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian European Relations 1402 1555 written by Matteo Salvadore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 14th century onward, political and religious motives led Ethiopian travelers to Mediterranean Europe. For two centuries, their ancient Christian heritage and the myth of a fabled eastern king named Prester John allowed the Ethiopians to engage the continent's secular and religious elites as peers. Meanwhile, back home the Ethiopian nobility came to welcome European visitors and at times even co-opted them by arranging mixed marriages and bestowing land rights. The protagonists of this encounter sought and discovered each other in royal palaces, monasteries, and markets throughout the Mediterranean basin, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean littoral, from Lisbon to Jerusalem and from Venice to Goa. Matteo Salvadore's narrative takes the reader on a voyage of reciprocal discovery that climaxed with the Portuguese intervention on the side of the Christian monarchy in the Ethiopian-Adali War. Thereafter, the arrival of the Jesuits at the Horn of Africa turned the mutually beneficial Ethiopian-European encounter into a bitter confrontation over the souls of Ethiopian Christians.
Download or read book Prester John written by John Buchan and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legends of Prester John were popular in Europe from the 12th through the 17th centuries, and told of a Christian patriarch and king said to rule over a Christian nation lost amidst the Muslims and pagans in the Orient. Written accounts of this kingdom are variegated collections of medieval popular fantasy. Prester John was reportedly a descendant of one of the Three Magi, said to be a generous ruler and a virtuous man, presiding over a realm full of riches and strange creatures, in which the Patriarch of the Saint Thomas Christians resided. His kingdom contained such marvels as the Gates of Alexander and the Fountain of Youth, and even bordered the Earthly Paradise. At first, Prester John was imagined to reside in India. After the coming of the Mongols to the Western world, accounts placed the king in Central Asia. Prester John's kingdom was thus the object of a quest, firing the imaginations of generations of adventurers, but remaining out of reach.
Download or read book The Two Cities written by Otto I (Bishop of Freising) and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A New History of Ethiopia written by Hiob Ludolf and published by . This book was released on 1684 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book PRESTER JOHN Annotated Edition by JOHN BUCHAN written by John Buchan and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legend of Prester John, a wealthy Christian king with a kingdom somewhere outside of the Western European realm, pervaded European thought throughout the Middle Ages. The limited understanding of the unexplored regions of the world and the inability to find his kingdom resulted in shifting versions of the legend. Over the course of the Middle Ages, Europeans believed his kingdom existed in the Far East, India, and, finally, the interior of Africa.
Download or read book Assembling the Tropics written by Hugh Cagle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts the convergence of science, culture, and politics across Portugal's empire, showing how a global geographical concept was born. In accessible, narrative prose, this book explores the unexpected forms that science took in the early modern world. It highlights little-known linkages between Asia and the Atlantic world.
Download or read book The Glory of the Empire written by Jean D'Ormesson and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Glory of the Empire is the rich and absorbing history of an extraordinary empire, at one point a rival to Rome. Rulers such as Basil the Great of Onessa, who founded the Empire but whose treacherous ways made him a byword for infamy, and the romantic Alexis the bastard, who dallied in the fleshpots of Egypt, studied Taoism and Buddhism, returned to save the Empire from civil war, and then retired “to learn to die,” come alive in The Glory of the Empire, along with generals, politicians, prophets, scoundrels, and others. Jean d’Ormesson also goes into the daily life of the Empire, its popular customs, and its contribution to the arts and the sciences, which, as he demonstrates, exercised an influence on the world as a whole, from the East to the West, and whose repercussions are still felt today. But it is all fiction, a thought experiment worthy of Jorge Luis Borges, and in the end The Glory of the Empire emerges as a great shimmering mirage, filling us with wonder even as it makes us wonder at the fugitive nature of power and the meaning of history itself.
Download or read book PRESTER JOHN by JOHN BUCHAN Annotated Edition written by John Buchan and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2020-07-17 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legend of Prester John, a wealthy Christian king with a kingdom somewhere outside of the Western European realm, pervaded European thought throughout the Middle Ages. The limited understanding of the unexplored regions of the world and the inability to find his kingdom resulted in shifting versions of the legend. Over the course of the Middle Ages, Europeans believed his kingdom existed in the Far East, India, and, finally, the interior of Africa.
Download or read book Mason Dixon written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Mason & Dixon - like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses - is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature." - John Leonard, The Nation Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as reimagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse. Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason & Dixon take us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment’s dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later lives, through incongruities in conscience, parallaxes of personality, tales of questionable altitude told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost. Along the way they encounter a plentiful cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Samuel Johnson, as well as a Chinese feng shui master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a robot duck. The quarrelsome, daring, mismatched pair—Mason as melancholy and Gothic as Dixon is cheerful and pre-Romantic—pursues a linear narrative of irregular lives, observing, and managing to participate in the many occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason.
Download or read book Prester John The Legend and its Sources written by and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the mysterious oriental leader Prester John, who ruled a land teeming with marvels and might come to the aid of Christians in the Levant, held an intense grip on the medieval mind. It has received much scholarly attention, but never before have the sources been collected and coherently presented to readers. This book now brings together a fully-representative set of sources from which we get our knowledge of the legend. These texts, spanning from the Crusades to the Enlightenment, are presented in their original languages and in English translation.
Download or read book Medieval Ethiopian Kingship Craft and Diplomacy with Latin Europe written by Verena Krebs and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores why Ethiopian kings pursued long-distance diplomatic contacts with Latin Europe in the late Middle Ages. It traces the history of more than a dozen embassies dispatched to the Latin West by the kings of Solomonic Ethiopia, a powerful Christian kingdom in the medieval Horn of Africa. Drawing on sources from Europe, Ethiopia, and Egypt, it examines the Ethiopian kings’ motivations for sending out their missions in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – and argues that a desire to acquire religious treasures and foreign artisans drove this early intercontinental diplomacy. Moreover, the Ethiopian initiation of contacts with the distant Christian sphere of Latin Europe appears to have been intimately connected to a local political agenda of building monumental ecclesiastical architecture in the North-East African highlands, and asserted the Ethiopian rulers’ claim of universal kingship and rightful descent from the biblical king Solomon. Shedding new light on the self-identity of a late medieval African dynasty at the height of its power, this book challenges conventional narratives of African-European encounters on the eve of the so-called ‘Age of Exploration'.
Download or read book The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality written by Denise Aigle and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-10-23 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality, Denise Aigle presents the Mongol empire as a moment of contact between political ideologies, religions, cultures and languages, and, in terms of reciprocal representations, between the Far East, the Muslim East, and the Latin West. The first part is devoted to “The memoria of the Mongols in historical and literary sources” in which she examines how the Mongol rulers were perceived by the peoples with whom they were in contact. In “Shamanism and Islam” she studies the perception of shamanism by Muslim authors and their attempts to integrate Genghis Khan and his successors into an Islamic framework. The last sections deal with geopolitical questions involving the Ilkhans, the Mamluks, and the Latin West. Genghis Khan’s successors claimed the protection of “Eternal Heaven” to justify their conquests even after their Islamization.
