Word: prester
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...young Baudolino is brought under the loving protection of Frederick, the Holy Roman Emperor known to history as Barbarossa. As a grown man, Baudolino persuades the Emperor to give up trying to subdue the restive city-states of Italy and to journey instead to the Far Eastern realm of Prester John, a mythical Christian King. After Frederick dies (history says he drowned, but Eco has a more complicated explanation), Baudolino and friends continue in search of Prester John's realm...
...bogs down. Eco comes up with one-legged creatures, manticores and other literary special effects, but none that make this lengthy book as much brainy fun as The Name of the Rose, his wizardly first novel. "I'll tell you more about him," Baudolino promises at one point about Prester John. "Maybe even too much." Now that observation is indisputably true. --By Richard Lacayo
...stand beside Alan Moorehead's White Nile and Blue Nile. Unlike the Nile, the Congo held no fascination for Europeans. It was discovered almost by accident by the Portuguese mariner Diogo Cao, who sailed into its mouth in 1482 while searching for, among other things, the kingdom of Prester John, whose realm had been the object of crusades for centuries...
...book, nor did there appear any bright prospects for the future. The Mamelukes [the ruling class of Egypt] had made the country almost as inaccessible to travelers as Tibet is today, the Sudan was virtually unknown, and Ethiopia, locked away in its remote mountains, was still the land of Prester John, a region of horrendous legends and medieval myths...
Before the Grail is restored to its keeper, the Prester John of early Christian lore, the reader sees murder done and a black mass sung, right in broad British daylight. In short, he enters the other world of Charles Williams (TIME, Nov. 8 et seq.), the English religious mystic who toward the end of his life (1945) set on paper a series of modern visions which he called novels (All Hallows' Eve, Descent into Hell...