#yarina's accomplishments in the academy are overshadowed by her family name - by /ergal's name/ - and she seethes with resentment

[wizzard890]

our call of cthulhu campaign

Yarina Uglitsky (act i) 

“…Tales of Prester John’s magnificent kingdom opened the borders of western imagination. No longer did the Byzantine Empire mark the edge of the Christian world; here, suddenly, were rumors of a vast, strange country hidden beyond the Gates of Alexander, guarded by monsters, populated by a spectacularly wealthy and learned people, whose eyes were turned to heaven.

It is academically en vogue to dismiss this dreamed kingdom as a non-entity, and to apply a historiographic lens to those peoples considered the source of the legend. We are likely dealing with legendary Nestorian Christians and converted Mongol tribes, an exaggerated history of the Great Steppe from the fall of the Turkic khanate in the eighth century to the formation of the Mongol Empire in the first half of the thirteenth.

But this reduction does a disservice to the medieval mind, and indeed, to the intellectual evolution of the Soviet academy. In every meaningful way save the most prosaic, the Kingdom of Prester John existed. It could not be found, but over and over again it sent ripples westward.

On September 27, 1177, Pope Alexander III gave his private physician a letter addressed to Prester John himself, a greeting of brotherhood and, crucially, military alliance. The young physician, Phillip, set out from Rome to deliver the message by hand. He sent no dispatches from his travels, and so one is left to envision the burning deserts, the solitary nights, his commingled wonder and dread as he reached the edge of the map.

In the intervening years, the Pope turned his attention to the forcible conversion of Baltic pagans, and convening the Third Council of the Lateran, both more tangible expressions of Christian power, and indeed, achievements which utterly cemented his legacy. There is no indication that he concerned himself further with his long-departed physician.

The young man was never heard from again.”

- Dr. Yarina Uglitsky, Professor of Medieval History, Moscow University; “The Receding Kingdom: Frontier and Belief in the Medieval West”.