APPENDIX.
382
It is expedient to add that the dollar is reckoned in this work at 100 cents of the United States of North America, and four shillings and six pence of England.
No. X I X . PRESTER
JOHN:
S A I D to be derived from the Persian Prestegani signifies apostolique; or Preschtak-Gëham,
or Perestigani,
angel of the world.
which It is
the name of a potent Christian monarch of shadowy renown, whose domin ions were placed by writers of the middle ages sometimes in the remote parts of Asia and sometimes in Africa, and of whom such contradictory accounts were given by the travelers of those days that the very exist ence either of him or his kingdom came to be considered doubtful.
It
now appears to be admitted, that there really was such a potentate in a remote part of Asia.
H e was of the Nestorian Christians, a sect spread
throughout Asia, and taking its name and origin from Nestorius, a Christian patriarch of Constantinople. T h e first vague reports of a Christian potentate in the interior of Asia, or as it was then called India, were brought to Europe by the Crusaders, who it is supposed gathered them from the Syrian merchants who traded to the very confines of China. In subsequent ages, when the Portuguese in their travels and voyages discovered a Christian king among the Abyssinians, called Baleel-Gian, they confounded him with the potentate already spoken of.
Nor was the
blunder extraordinary, since the original Prester John was said to reign over a remote part of India ; and the ancients included in that name Ethio pia and all the regions of Africa and Asia bordering on the R e d Sea and on the commercial route from Egypt to India. O f the Prester John of India we have reports furnished by William Ruysbrook, commonly called Rubruquis, a Franciscan friar sent by Louis I X , about the middle of the thirteenth century to convert the Grand Khan. According to him, Prester John was originally a Nestorian priest, who on the death of the sovereign made himself king of the Naymans, all Nesto rian Christians.
Carpini, a Franciscan friar, sent by pope Innocent in