Medieval bestiary and prestor john

Benst

New Member
I've been fascinated by this for a while, ever since I started becoming obsessive with documentaries on the Medieval world... (and by obsessive, I mean like...every single night!)

There's been a fw good ones, the most interesting I have seen is this series Inside the Medieval Mind:


Anyways, so the Medieval Christian mindset was filled with folklore, supersititon, and we derive a lot of our modern folklore from them. It was all within the Christian cosmological mindset of the Great Chain of Being, a chain of proper order and the place of all beings starting with God leading all the way down to inanimate stones. Ofcourse, the world was a lot different and not well understood and was populated by some rather curious beings.

The first was the Dogheads, a race of beings of whom serious philosophical arguments were made as to whether they were more human or animal and whether they had souls. Dogheads were like Humans, but had dogs-heads and were always living somewhere far away. The other major myth was that of Prestor John, probably a bastardized form of Tibetan Buddhist establishment in Tibet or the establishment of Ethiopian Christianity in Africa, various Nestorian Christian communities or the Thomas Christians found in India. Prestor John was said to be a Christian Prince or Bishop somewhere in Asia. It was so believed that several Popes sent ambassadors out to try and find Prestor John.

Ofcoruse there were also the many stories and myths related to Giants and fairies, and the types of hobgoblins and house-brownies, and the various chivalric myths like King Arthur. The water goddess Melusine, recently quite popular because of the White Queen books.

So, I'm just curious of our members here are there any of you who are interested in this and if so what's your favourite medieval myth?
 

Alejandro

Active Member
Are the Dogheads that you're talking about supposed to be the Kynokephaloi, also known as Hemikynoi, "Half-Dogs," of Greco-Roman mythology?
 

Alejandro

Active Member
Dem some interesting articles :) They actually seem to be saying that we're referring to the same thing, the difference being, I suppose, that I was thinking exclusively about the ancient writings concerning these creatures - called Kynokephaloi in Greek and Cynocephali in Latin, both of which translate to "Dog-Heads" - while your focus is on the medieval viewpoint thereof. The only place I'd ever read about them before your articles is this page>> http://www.theoi.com/Phylos/Kunokephaloi.html << which quotes some of the same ancient Greek and Roman authors cited by your links. The only significant difference between the ancient and the medieval mythology about them appears to be the creatures' origin story, whom Hesiod (the one who calls them Half-Dogs) makes the offspring of the earth-goddess Gaia either by the sea-god Poseidon or by the Egyptian king Epaphos, while ancient and medieval Christian authors apparently had a metaphysics problem on their hands with the same topic of origin. Maybe Hesiod's connection of these creatures with Epaphos is based on the Egyptian god Anubis as the original Dog-Head? But most of Africa's inhabitants, in fact, were supposed to share this heritage according to the same passage of Hesiod, which describes Libyans, Aithiopians, Catudaeans ("Undergrounders," or Troglodytes, i.e., Cave-Dwellers), Pygmies, Melanokhrotoi ("Blackskins"), as well as the European or Eurasian peoples called Scythians and Hyperboreans, as being the children of Gaia by Poseidon or Epaphos.

Herodotus took things a bit further by claiming that the Aithiopians were the tallest, most beautiful people in the world, who dwelt near the palace of Helios (the sun) at the eastern edge of the world, and who on account of their great virtuousness were blessed with either exceedingly long life or immortality and by the company of the gods who feasted and played some sports with them annually (as seen in a scene of Homer's Iliad). The Roman writer Pliny the Elder, apparently building upon this foundation, specifies localities which would put the Aithiopians in what is now Sudan in East Africa (whose people, as it happens, are [typically] very tall), and in the same passage that he mentions the Cynocephali he refers to a tribe of people whose average height is twelve feet, and who are called the Syrbotae. From this developed a belief that somewhere in this region was a kingdom of giants who were so rich they could afford to use golden chains to shackle their prisoners. This background probably went some distance in creating aspects of the legend of Prester John, who, from around the end of the medieval period until the late 18th century, was thought to be the Emperor of [Abysinnian] Ethiopia (rather than the ancient Sudanese Aithiopia). Incidentally, on the other side of the continent there had been an extremely wealthy Muslim monarch, Mansa Musa of Mali, who brought so much gold into Mecca on his 1324 pilgrimage there that his Arabia visit devalued that commodity in the region for the next decade but also ended up indirectly funding the Italian Renaissance (while back home in West Africa he is supposed to have commissioned an expedition across the Atlantic Ocean from Mali to the Americas)! Maybe Europeans needed a powerful enough Christian ally on the continent to rival the Malian emperor when they developed the idea of the Ethiopian nəgusä nägäst as their Prester John?

Going back to the aforementioned dog-men, I knew that St Christopher was a Canaanite [or Cananaean] giant named Reprobus but I hadn't yet come across the interpretation which confused Cananenus with "canine," and hadn't yet seen the depictions of him with a dog's head. It makes his own hero-origin story that much more uncanny, what with his reward of a more human appearance for his acceptance of baptism. The Dog-Heads, together with other fantastical tribes mentioned in that Quodlibeta article (e.g., Skiapodes [or Monopods], Makhyles, Nouloi and Blemmyai), are actually all from a certain genre of Greco-Roman mythology which was of such interest in the medieval period before eventual realisations, upon travelling far enough around the world, that no such tribes or creatures actually exist[ed]. The unicorn (or monokeros as the Greeks would've called it) is actually another creature from the same [late] Greco-Roman myths which falls into this category but whose mythology seems to have outlasted that of the Dog-Heads and those other bestiary beasties ;) into the modern imagination (and which, together with the Dog-Heads, also features in some Arthuriana).
 
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Benst

New Member
My appologies for getting back to this so late, I only have limited time sometimes to reply and wanted to write a decent response. I think you're spot on Alejandro, it seems that the idea of Dogheads did evolve from the earlier greco-roman myths. Ofcourse the interesting relationship between Antiquity and the Middle Ages was that some texts from Greece and Rome were completly extinct or forgotten whilst others were reproduced and propagated. The Christians were relient on Muslim traders from the east to better inform them on the world after the end of the classical period, and often these accounts were embellished with the older accounts of the east in texts like Pliny and Herodotus. Aegypt and India are interesting phenomenon, because at times they both meant Asia or Ethiopia.

Prester John could have had his sources in any number of travellers tales. I would like to think that it was Tibetan Buddhist Lamas that gave rise to the legend, although it most probably was the Nagus of Ethiopia. Ethiopia is an amazing place, actually, considering they were located so close to the heartland of Islam. Yet, if you go there (I havn't yet but I wouldn't mind) they have castles that are very similar to European ones in the Holy Land, as well as a very vibrant form of Christianity that isn't so different from the Orthadox of Byzantium. If travellers from Europe did go down into Ethiopia quite regularly, it would make sense that the legend eventually took root.
 

Alejandro

Active Member

No sweat about the response-time.

Is one of the castles you’re referring to that of Emperor Fasilidas [Basilides]?

I haven't (yet :D) been to Abysinnia either but intend to someday sooner than later. One of the most colourful emperors of the country was Gebre Mesqel Lalibela in the 13th century AD, whose last name often stands alone and means "The Bees Recognise His Sovereignty" (which I find to be a rather curious as a political argument but maybe it was more compelling back in the day…?). The second-most sacred city of modern Ethiopia (after Aksum) is a northern town which was named after this king. Legend has it that Emperor Lalibela abdicated the throne in order to spend time building the rock-hewn churches which are now a tourist and pilgrim attraction in Lalibela Town. Supposedly he was helped in this task solely by heaven-sent angels. One of the things that's fascinated me the most about Lalibela and Ethiopia in general is the celebrity enjoyed by St George (or Giyorgis as he is known in Amharic; the same dragon-slaying hero who's the patron saint of England) over there. In Abysinnia, Giyorgis and other legendary and Biblical figures are depicted as dark-skinned saints, an artistic tradition these guys share with their ancient and medieval neighbours, the Christians of Nubia (the more oldskool “Ethiopia”). Speaking of Byzantine Orthodoxy, before Nubia was invaded by Arabs who Islamised the place, the Christians (at least the rich ones) there wore Greek attire, spoke Greek, and had strong ties to the Church in Byzantium, whose influence is evidenced in their portrait painting-style. It might not be such a stretch to imagine that the Prester John legend could have arisen from stuff going on in Asia, though, since Christianity was actually first introduced into places like India and China (similarly to Egypt and East Africa) some centuries before the advent of "Christendom" in Europe... granted that it doesn't seem to have had any very lasting strength in those Asian countries before the Portuguese and other Europeans invaded them centuries afterwards. So if it is an originally Eastern Asian thing, maybe you've got it right with the theory about the Lamas.

So I wasn’t quite accurate in mentioning one of the tribes mentioned in your Quodlibeta article when I said that those tribes never existed. The Blemmyai [Blemmyae in Latin], a group of people mentioned by Herodotus and Pliny the Elder, were supposed to be headless, with faces on their chests. I hadn’t been aware that their legend was so popular in medieval Europe, and after that period, that even Shakespeare mentions them a few times, e.g., through his character Othello, who however ends up confounding them with a different group located in Africa and/or Scythia, called the Anthropophagoi, “People-Eaters,” or Androphagoi, “Man-Eaters.” I don’t know why Herodotus or Pliny should have named their sternophthalmic (“chest-eyed” as they were also known) tribe after a quite non-fantastical and definitely human one, for there was in Roman times a nomadic group of East Desert Nubians called the Blemmyes, who occupied quite a bit of what is now Sudan and shared a border with Aksum and the Red Sea. But maybe I’m putting the chicken before the egg, since Herodotus wrote about his Blemmyai well before the rise of the Roman Empire, while Strabo, who describes his Blemmyes as a peaceful people, is writing about them almost 400 years after Herodotus’ time. I wonder if these people had a different name for themselves altogether, Blemmyes being a label placed upon them by Greeks and Romans(?)…

Regarding your pointing out the ancients’ confusion of East Africa with India (or their conflation of the two) under the name Aithiopia, the Egyptian writer Nonnus does something kinda interesting with this in connection to the Blemmyes. In his epic the Dionysiaka, Nonnus has the wine-god Dionysos go to war against his second cousin King Deriades of India and defeat him. One of Deriades’ vassals was Blemys, chief of the “Erythraean” (Red Sea?) Indians, which group spoke many different languages (thus a confederation of different “Indian” peoples/tribes[?]; maybe actually Arabs, if they lived by the Red Sea?). After the fall of Deriades, Blemys bent the knee to Dionysos, recognising his victory, and the Greek god lifted him and sent him and his people away to “the Arabian land, where beside the sea he dwelt on a rich soil and gave his name to his people. Blemys quickly passed to the mouth of seven-stream Neilos [Nile], to be the sceptred king of the Aithiopes, men of colour like his. The ground of Meroë [a powerful Nubian kingdom which shared a border with the land of the Blemmyes] welcomed him, where it is always harvest [a reference to the blessedness and immortality/longevity of Homer’s and Herodotus’ Aithiopes?], a chieftain who handed down his name to the Blem[m]yes of later generations.”
 
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