The man known to history as Nostradamus was
born in 1503 as Michel de Nostredame. The exact circumstances of his birth are unclear,
but he is believed to have been born in December of that year in the Provence region of southern
France, most likely on either the 14th or 21st in the town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. His father was Jaume or Jacques de Nostredame,
a notary who worked for the government in Provence. Michel’s mother was Reyniére, a granddaughter
of Pierre de Saint-Rémy, a prominent physician in the town of Saint-Rémy. Jacques and Reyniére had at least nine children,
though the precise number is unclear, a not unusual occurrence in a time of patchy birth
records and high infant mortality. The Nostredame family had a somewhat shadowy
background and there is little information about Michel’s childhood. The family was possibly Jewish in origin. This placed them in a difficult position,
because the Jewish people had come under severe persecution in France and other countries
such as England in the High Middle Ages, with governments issuing orders for them to either
leave those dominions entirely or convert to Christianity. Many converted, but continued to practice
Judaism in private. The Nostredame family held out for many centuries
to come, in part because the weak de-centralised nature of the French crown made royal enforcement
of such directives in regions such as Provence difficult. Evidently though, the pressure to convert
was significant enough by the mid-fifteenth century that Michel’s grandfather, his father
Jacques’s father, a man named Cresquas of whom he know little other than that he worked
as a moneylender in Avignon, decided to finally convert to Roman Catholicism. When he did he adopted the Christian name
Pierre and the surname Nostredame, which means ‘Our Lady’, a symbol of his having converted
on Our Lady’s Day, a significant religious festival at the time celebrated on the 25th
of March. Michel’s Jewish background may have been
somewhat significant. There was a major strain of mysticism and
esoteric knowledge involved in Jewish literature and thought in Europe in the late medieval
and early modern periods, ones which influenced Michel’s later writings. Foremost here was the Jewish Kaballah, a school
of thought in Jewish mysticism which sought to explain the relationship between an unchanging,
eternal God and the finite world of mortals. This focused on sacred texts, many of them
away from the mainstream of Judaism and a good deal of which utilised language and rituals
which were open to myriad interpretations. The language could often be vague and of an
apocalyptic nature. For instance, the most central text within
it, the Zohar, is a group of books offering mystical commentary on the Jewish Torah. Significantly, the Kaballah emerged most strongly
within the Jewish communities of Spain and southern France in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries and so the Nostredame family were most likely exposed to this extensively in
the centuries that followed. Scholars have long noted the influence of
the Kaballah and Jewish mysticism on Nostradramus’s later writings. We know almost nothing about Michel’s earliest
years. A theory that he was educated in his childhood
with his maternal grandfather and it was from him which he gained some of his earliest training
as a physician is certainly spurious, as Pierre de Saint-Rémy died when Michel was still
an infant. What is clear is that in 1518, when he was
fourteen years old, Michel entered the University of Avignon, one of France’s oldest universities,
having been first established in 1303. There he began studying for his Baccalaureate,
a degree which like nearly all educational curricula in Europe at the time was heavily
centred on grammar, rhetoric and logic and the works of Greek and Roman writers such
as Aristotle and Cicero. However, Michel’s time here was cut short
by a major outbreak of the bubonic plague in southern France, one which forced the college
authorities to close the institution. This was standard procedure at the time and
when major plague outbreaks occurred, those who had the means to do so tended to flee
from cities and towns to rural areas to avoid the crowded urban settings in which disease
proliferates. The closure of Avignon in the late 1510s inadvertently
led to a formative period in Michel’s life. He took the opportunity to begin travelling
widely and it was during this period when he was moving around Western Europe that he
seemingly undertook much of his initial training as a physician in an informal capacity. Unfortunately we have few precise details
of what exactly he was doing during these years or where he was undertaking his studies,
but we can glean much by assessing the state of medical knowledge in Europe in the 1520s. This was a time prior to the Medical Revolution
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the first scientific assessment of how
to treat ailments began to be undertaken. Instead, the treatment of illness in the sixteenth
century relied to an overwhelming extent on practices with little medical efficacy, particularly
bloodletting, the practice of drawing off a significant amount of blood from a sick
individual. Owing to the belief, inherited from Greek
and Roman physicians such as Galen, that the body’s health was based on the balancing
of the humors such as bile, it was believed that blood-letting could serve to recalibrate
the body humors. Elsewhere medical practice was based on folk
remedies and limited forms of surgery. A huge array of ailments which we would consider
minor today could result in death in the sixteenth century owing to the unavailability of basic
medicines such as penicillin and the fact that there would be no vaccines available
for another two and a half centuries. Given this, the medical knowledge which Michel
would have acquired in the 1520s was as much based on folk remedies and sheer hope, than
it was on any hard science. The details of Michel’s life become somewhat
clearer in the late 1520s. He had evidently established himself as an
apothecary in southern France at some point in the mid-1520s, and. in 1529, he decided to acquire greater knowledge
still in his field by attending the University of Montpellier. The University of Montpellier was home to
one of the oldest formal medical schools in Europe, having been established here as far
back as the 1130s, though this was predated by the medical school founded in Salerno in
Italy in the eleventh century. However, Michel’s time here, like with his
sojourn at Avignon a decade earlier, did not last long. Within weeks the college authorities at Montpellier
had learned that he had worked as an apothecary prior to entering the university. This was a clear violation of the university
statutes which prohibited students from having previously engaged in a manual trade, at a
time when Europe’s universities were still the preserve of the affluent sons of the nobility
and the gentry. Thus, just weeks after he arrived there Michel
was expelled from Montpellier. A copy of his expulsion order has survived
and is found in the archives of the University of Montpellier to this day. While he would doubtlessly have seen his expulsion
from Montpellier as a setback, Michel, who was still just in his mid-twenties, seems
to have taken the rebuff as a motivation to further his own personal studies and business. Thus, in the course of the early 1530s he
began to specialise as a ‘plague doctor’, the kind of physician who in the early modern
times treated those afflicted by the monstrous bubonic plague. Though it is most usually associated with
the apocalyptic Black Death outbreak of the 1340s and 1350s, one which killed upwards
of one-third of Europe’s people, the plague continued to strike at different parts of
Europe with regularity over the centuries that followed. It was particularly common in southern France
which lay along the main trade routes between Italy and northern Europe, the passage of
people through which often led to outbreaks such as that which closed Avignon when Michel
was there in the late 1510s. Despite its virulence, methods for treating
the plague remained limited, though the effectiveness of social distancing and quarantining were
well-known. Thus, the term ‘quarantine’ itself derives
from the Italian for forty, the number of days which ships were required to wait at
anchor in the harbour of a port like Venice before unloading their goods if they were
coming from a region where there was known to be a plague outbreak. Michel’s method for fighting the plague
was the use of ‘rose pills’ which he devised himself. These consisted of a mix of rose petals, sawdust
from green cypress trees, cloves, calamus and lign-aloes. These by themselves would have been completely
ineffective, but in tandem with his ‘rose pills’ Michel also directed individuals
in a plague impacted town or village to ensure that the bodies of those who died from the
disease were quickly removed and buried and that surfaces were washed and kept clean. He also recommended to people that they get
plenty of fresh air and, unlike the vast majority of his contemporaries, he didn’t recommend
bloodletting as a way of staving off the disease. Thus, while his ‘rose pills’ were useless,
Michel’s prescriptions around sanitations were positive. These sanitation measures must have been effective,
for in the early-to-mid-1530s his reputation as a ‘plague doctor’ grew around southern
France and he was regularly called upon by communities where disease had broken out to
visit them and offer advice. In time this ensured he became financially
independent. For instance, when the plague broke out in
Aix, the capital of Provence, in the late 1530s Michel headed there and helped the city
authorities stop its spread. They subsequently rewarded him with a pension
for life for his services. Michel had also married by this time. In 1531 he had taken up an offer presented
to him by Jules-César Scaliger, an Italian physician who was living in the town of Agen
in south-western France. Once there Michel married a local woman, whose
name was possibly Henriette d’Encausse. They quickly had two sons together, but the
marriage ended in tragedy when Michel’s wife and two children were themselves carried
off by a plague outbreak in 1534. It may have been this personal tragedy that
caused him to redouble his efforts at developing methods of stopping the virulence and spread
of plague. And his time at Agen was significant for other
reasons. Scaliger, who had first invited him to the
town, was a formidable scholar with a reputation throughout Europe, one who had engaged in
debates in print with Desiderius Erasmus, the leading European scholar of the first
half of the sixteenth century. Thus, while in Agen Michel was able to make
use of Scaliger’s extensive library. While we cannot be sure what he read here
and how it influenced his subsequent writings, doubtless anything he was perusing in print
during these years could be viewed as an influence on Michel’s subsequent written works. In 1538 an event was to occur which would
influence the course of much of the rest of Michel’s life and without which we may never
have heard of him today. That year he was accused of heresy in France. This was a dangerous time to be seen as a
heretic. The Protestant Reformation had swept across
Germany and was beginning to infiltrate large parts of Western Europe, France included. Fearful no doubt of extraordinary punishment,
Michel did not attend his trial and effectively went on the run. Much of this was within France itself and
it appears that his crime, whatever had led him to being accused of heresy, was limited
enough that he was able to continue working in Provence and other regions. However, he also travelled further afield
to Italy. It was here that he established contacts within
the printing industry, the capital of which in southern Europe was located at Venice. Though he did not begin publishing just yet,
Michel would soon and it would be owing to his Italian influences. Meanwhile, in the mid-1540s he returned to
France where he was yet again involved in fighting a plague outbreak in the city of
Marseilles. Shortly thereafter he finally settled down
in Salon-de-Provence and it was here in the late 1540s where he started a second family
after marrying an affluent widow by the name of Anne Ponsarde. They would have three sons and three daughters
in the years that followed. Moreover, between his wife’s own financial
means and the extensive pensions and payments he had accrued himself as a plague doctor
over the years, Michel was in a position to settle down as a writer as he entered what
we would now term middle age, but which at the time was seen as old age. Michel’s authorial career began in 1550
when he published his first book. This was an almanac, a kind of small booklet
or pamphlet. These short and cheap publications were the
foundation of the publishing industry in sixteenth-century Europe, a time when full books were still
expensive to produce, but small eight, sixteen or thirty-two page booklets could be mass-produced
quickly and sold for a reasonable price. Accordingly almanacs on all manner of different
subjects, from the religious disputes which were ongoing between Catholics and Protestants
to agricultural matters and recipe books were produced across Europe at the time. Almanacs were a kind of sub-genre which offered
information on a subject relevant to that year. Michel’s first one was on astrological predictions
and he was inspired to write it after visiting Italy again and meeting with his acquaintances
in the publishing sector there. Here he took the decision to Latinise his
name and identify himself as Nostradamus on the cover, a flourish of showmanship which
would have enduring implications. The almanac was a commercial success and in
the years that followed he continued to publish at least one on an annual basis. Unfortunately, despite the fact that they
sold well at the time, copies of these have generally not survived down to the present
day and it is generally not possible to determine how Nostradamus’s prophetic writings evolved
in the early 1550s from the almanacs into what would later become his more well-known
Prophecies. We do know the general structure of the almanacs. These consisted of twelve four-line long poems
or quatrains, ones which offered predictions for the coming year couched in rhyming language. These were written in vague, esoteric, almost
secretive language of a kind which was certainly of interest and peculiar to the mid-sixteenth-century
reader, and which also had the added advantage of being open to a very wide interpretation. They were instantly popular and, as they were,
Nostradamus determined that they were a good format for him to continue writing in. Thus, even as he was producing his annual
almanacs in the first years of the 1550s he was also conceiving of a much more extensive
project, where hundreds of quatrains would be written on a vast array of supposed future
events that would occur in Europe and beyond. He was encouraged in this by his growing reputation
as a clairvoyant and mystic in southern France during the 1550s and as his almanacs became
well-known it was common for wealthy French nobles, merchants and members of the gentry
to seek him out for his thoughts on their affairs and what the future might hold. Then eventually in 1555 he published the first
section of his great work, which he termed the Centuries originally, but which he eventually
named the Prophecies and published the first volume of as Les premieres centuries, ou Prophéties
at the city of Lyon that year. The Prophecies consist of 942 quatrains spread
over ten centuries. This was the cumulative amount which was eventually
brought together and published as a single edition in 1568 shortly after Nostradamus’s
death. However, the publication history was fragmentary
and the first edition in 1555, for instance, was restricted to 353 quatrains and a preface. Much like his almanacs, these were rhyming,
four-line poems which offered highly ambiguous prophetic statements about what might occur
in the future. For instance, one of the very first quatrains
stated that, “When the litters are overturned by the whirlwind and faces are covered by
cloaks, the new republic will be troubled by its people. At this time the reds and whites will rule
wrongly.” This is ambiguous enough that people of future
years and generations could read very many different things into it at different times. Moreover, because the Prophecies were not
said to have specific reference to individual years, unlike the almanacs, the contents of
these quatrains could theoretically relate to an event at an indeterminate point in the
future. It was this combination of vagueness and prediction
that would eventually allow Nostradamus’s Prophecies to be interpreted in a seemingly
limitless number of ways. The topics covered by Nostradamus were varied,
but tended to centre on what might broadly be termed political and social events. There was extensive talk of kings and queens
and empires and kingdoms throughout the Prophecies. Much of it was also historically rooted, with
reference either to people and places from the distant past, or to the passage of time
beyond Nostradamus’s own time of writing, as one would expect from a work of prophetic
rhymes. An indicative passage was the following towards
the end of the first century of quatrains: “At the time Cyprus will be frustrated of
its relief by those of the Aegean Sea. Old ones slaughtered. But by speeches and supplications their King
seduced, the Queen more.” Elsewhere famous heroes of the ancient world
such as Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general who marched with elephants over the Alps at
the start of the Second Punic War with Rome in the third century BC, is mentioned. Other passages mention Greek and Roman gods
and goddesses frequently, while Nostradamus was also preoccupied by weather cycles and
the movements of fleets on the great seas. Unsurprisingly he was fascinated by wars and
natural disasters and the Prophecies are effectively an endless catalogue of awful events and periods
of turmoil yet to come in human history. The geographical range of the Prophecies was
very considerable. Editions of the book which were printed included
subtitles such as Represents Part of What Is Now Happening in France, in England, in
Spain, and in Other Parts of the World, indicating that Nostradamus perceived his work as relating
to events which would occur well beyond the parochial concerns of southern France. For instance, place-names which are given
in the text include references to parts of Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, the Black
Sea, Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, which at the time had grown to encompass much
of the Balkans, Middle East and North Africa. Some of this was indicative of the times Nostradamus
was living in. When he was born in the first years of the
sixteenth century Europeans had just discovered concrete ways of travelling around Africa
by sea and to the Americas by sailing westwards from Europe. The Prophecies reflect the revolutionary changes
which were occurring in European conceptions of geography and indeed the myriad new peoples
they were coming into contact with as they voyaged out ever further from Europe. It is also telling how specific many of the
references were. He is often not just referencing countries
well away from France, but individual cities and islands. Closer to home there are scores of specific
cities, towns and provinces in places like France, the Low Countries and Italy directly
mentioned. Given his concern with classical motifs, the
names used by the Romans for parts of Europe were also often employed. More broadly, the fact his work covered such
a large array of geographical places has made Nostradamus’s works more timeless and pertinent
to a greater array of people than they otherwise would have been. As esoteric as Nostradamus’s writings were,
hundreds of years of scholarship on the Prophecies has revealed that they were written in a fashion
which drew extensively on specific sources. For instance, Nostradamus was often anxious
to mimic events surrounding kings, queens, warlords, kingdoms and empires in his quatrains,
with talk of plagues visiting empires such as Rome, rulers being overthrown and great
changes striking republics and kingdoms. In order to acquire inspiration for how he
wrote these quatrains he delved deeply into classical history, reading works like the
Lives of the Twelve Caesars written by the Roman historical biographer, Suetonius, and
the comparative historical biographies of eminent Greeks and Romans composed by the
second century AD Greco-Roman historian Plutarch. Elsewhere he consulted more contemporary prophetic
works by religious figures such as the writings of Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar
who established a brief-lived theocracy in the city of Florence in Italy in the 1490s. We know this because the very earliest stages
of the Prophecies contain a series of Biblical quotes which are written in an almost identical
order to how Savonarola had used them in a text he wrote over half a century earlier. The similarity in the choice of Biblical quotes
and their arrangement is too similar for it to have been coincidental. Another major work which he utilised was the
Mirabilis Liber or Miraculous Book, a compendium of predictions by Christian saints and divines
which had been collected since the eleventh century and which was only finally published
in France in 1522. Many other passages of the Prophecies have
been found to extensively utilise similar texts or paraphrase entire passages. How Nostradamus used the texts which he employed
as source material remains a matter of considerable academic dispute. Some scholars believe his reading of them
was ordered and systematic, with the French doctor leafing through volumes in his study
in Salon-de-Provence until he found passages which inspired him. However, others, whose views on Nostradamus
are admittedly less favourable, propose that he simply threw open books like the Mirabilis
Liber randomly and drew inspiration from what was written on whatever page he landed on,
fashioning prophecies out of the contents of these haphazardly chosen sources. Exactly what mental space he was in as he
conducted his work has also been widely debated. Advocates of Nostradamus have been keen to
view him as meditating in a special way before he was inspired by some prophetic vision in
his study, perhaps by flame gazing or some other transcendental approach, but in the
only extant pieces of writing and personal correspondence in which he actually described
his writing method Nostradamus stated that he merely tried to attain a position of mental
calm and tranquillity before preparing his quatrains. There was nothing mystical in his process
and he repeatedly denied that he was a prophet of any kind. We have to also examine Nostradamus and his
work against the intellectual backdrop of the sixteenth century. This was a time when the Scientific Revolution
was in its infancy. During Nostradamus’s lifetime Nicolaus Copernicus
would publish On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, a work which revolutionised European
conceptions of existence in identifying how the planets of the solar system orbited around
the Sun, rather than the Earth being the centre of existence. It was also a period when the new Renaissance
learning which had emerged in Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was
spreading north over the Alps to France, Germany, the Low Countries and England. The Protestant Reformation began in Germany
in 1517, calling into question all of the established beliefs of the church. And Europeans were beginning to explore the
world. The Americas were discovered by various Italian,
Spanish and English mariners in the 1490s and 1500s, while the Portuguese had discovered
the sea route around Africa to India and China. In the early 1520s, when Nostradamus was just
entering his adult years, the first circumnavigation of the globe was accomplished by a Spanish
expedition led initially by Ferdinand Magellan. Everything at this time was open to interpretation
and every year brought the possibility of unique ways of viewing the world. Such a world was conducive towards individuals
like Nostradamus producing prophetic and esoteric or secretive works of the kind that he did. A strain of European intellectual debate in
the sixteenth century which was particularly relevant to Nostradamus’s writings was the
revival of Neo-Platonism and Hermeticism. These were intellectual movements that had
emerged in the last centuries of the Roman Empire and which focused on esoteric or secret
forms of knowledge. For instance, Hermeticism, the name of which
was taken from the Late Antique movement associated with the fabled scholar Hermes Trismegistus,
focused on areas of study like magic, astrology and alchemy. These were real subjects of scholarly dispute
in Europe in Nostradamus’s time and formed the basis of the scientific studies of many
scholars like Giordano Bruno, a sixteenth-century Italian scholar who blended astrology, proto-science,
Hermeticism and Neo-Platonism together in his work, and Sir Walter Raleigh and John
Dee in Elizabethan England, each of whom were looking to find the philosopher’s stone,
the substance which it was believed would allow individuals to turn any substance into
gold. Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, astrology and
prophetic writings were all part of the mainstream of intellectual discourse in sixteenth-century
Europe and Nostradamus was very much writing within this tradition. Our own scientific age might look about these
forms of inquiry as backward or primitive today, but the reality is that this open-minded
form of intellectual exploration was a key element of the development of the Scientific
Revolution. Thus, Nostradamus was writing at a time when
individuals such as himself with a background in medicine and proto-scientific inquiry were
often incorporating astrology, prophecy and other forms of esoteric knowledge into their
writings. Nostradamus’s writings, though, are not
remembered today for the intellectual landscape in which they were written, but for their
alleged predictions of major historical events. One of the more striking of Nostradamus’s
prophecies which is believed to have come to pass concerns the Great Fire of London. In early September 1666 a small fire in London
spread until it burned down a huge proportion of the city. The death toll was relatively minor, but it
destroyed most of the medieval city. In its aftermath many fans of Nostradamus
began to point towards a specific quatrain in his Prophecies which seemed to predict
this. This read, quote, “The blood of the just
will commit a fault at London. Burnt through lightning of twenty threes the
six. The ancient lady will fall from her high place. Several of the same sect will be killed.” This has been interpreted as a direct prediction
of the Great Fire, most obviously because of the specific references to a great burning
of London, but also because the reference to “twenty threes the six” which could
be interpreted to add up to 66. However, there was no lightning involved in
the Great Fire. Rather it started in a baker’s workshop,
very few people died unlike Nostradamus’s reference to “several of the same sect”
being killed and the reference to an ‘ancient lady’ has no obvious reference to the political
circumstances of England at the time. Nevertheless, the Great Fire and the seeming
reference to it further augmented Nostradamus’s reputation in the latter stages of the seventeenth
century. While his Prophecies did range over a wide
array of geographies, inevitably there was a particular focus on France and French affairs. Unsurprisingly, then, avid Nostradamus readers
have identified several major events in French history which the Provencal plague doctor
was believed to have predicted. The most prominent was the French Revolution
and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. There is an extensive series of quatrains
in one of his centuries which foretells a time of great strife and civil discord in
the country followed by a new ruler emerging. Here Nostradamus states, quote, “Of a name
which was never held by a French King. Never was there so terrible a thunderbolt. Italy, Spain and the English tremble.” This certainly fits with Napoleon. He came from a Corsican family of a middling
social class, one which was actually more Italian than French and which had never been
anywhere near ruling France in the past. His wars did involve England, Italy and Spain
and the Spanish Peninsula became a key centre of the Napoleonic Wars from the mid-1800s. However, the sceptic might note that times
of civil strife usually result in the emergency of entirely new ruling dynasties, while Italy,
Spain and England, as three of France’s immediate neighbours would be the most likely
to end up at war with France. Another major political figure in modern European
history who Nostradamus is alleged to have foreseen the emergence of is Adolf Hitler. One of Nostradamus’s quatrains runs as follows:
“From the depths of Western Europe will be born of poor folks a young child, who by
his tongue will seduce a great many people. His fame will spread to the Orient.” The more extended section within the centuries
explains how this individual will engage in “villainous, wicked, infamous” oppressions
and also refers to an “adulterine dame”, which proponents of the view that Nostradamus
predicted the rise of the Third Reich suggest is a coded reference to Nazism. The section ends by referring to the earth
being rendered “a horrible black in countenance” as a result of the actions of this individual
and his followers. A whole slew of other quatrains are also noted
as being relevant to the general course of the Second World War. For instance, one section which refers to
a large mastiff being driven from a city and then surprise at an alliance which is formed,
could be read as referring to England being driven from France and Paris in 1940 and the
somewhat unusual nature of the alliance which was briefly agreed between Nazi Germany and
Soviet Russia between 1939 and 1941. Elsewhere Nostradamus is believed to have
predicted the nuclear bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August
1945 at the very end of the Second World War. The passages are admittedly very tenuous. For instance, Nostradamus stated, quote, “Within
two cities there will be scourges the like of which was never seen,” while elsewhere
he foretells within the same quatrain that “famine within plague” will occur. Some have viewed the latter phrase to be a
reference to radiation sickness. In any event the reference to two cities has
a long-standing literary significance stretching all the way back to the Old Testament and
Nostradamus’s decision to use this phraseology was not unusual. Other quatrains which are entirely vague have
been applied to prominent political events. Eighteen years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, many individuals noted the
significance of Nostradamus’s statement that, quote, “From on high, evil will fall
on the great man.” Others noted that the same quatrain went on
to state, “A dead innocent will be accused of the deed.” These are wholly vague passages and belief
in the idea that they refer to JFK’s assassination assumes that Kennedy was both a great man
and that Harvey Lee Oswald, his supposed assassin, was innocent of the crime. Surely one of Nostradamus’s most famous
prophecies concerns his supposed prediction of the attacks on the Twin Towers of the World
Trade Centres on the 11th of September 2001 by al-Qaeda. It is hard not to see why. The relevant quatrain states that, quote “Two
steel birds will fall from the sky on the Metropolis. The Sky will burn at forty-five degrees latitude. Fire approaches the great new city. Immediately a huge, scattered flame leaps
up. Within months, rivers will flow with blood. The undead will roam the earth for little
time.” The “two steel birds” here which Nostradamus
refers to as falling from the sky on a great city is a striking statement about the planes
which crashed into the two towers, while the “scattered flame” which he refers to as
leaping up would certainly match with the inferno which was unleashed above downtown
Manhattan that morning in 2001. Moreover, the reference to rivers of blood
being shed “Within months” is a striking portent of the fact that the United States
would invade Afghanistan just weeks later and later Iraq in response to the attacks. Fans of the significance of Nostradamus’s
Prophecies certainly have a strong argument that quatrains such as these are strikingly
prophetic. And then there are the more recent events
still. Many have noted the relevance of a quatrain
pertaining to 2022 in which Nostradamus stated, “Because they disapprove of his divorce. A man who later they consider unworthy. The people will force out the King of the
islands. A Man will replace him who never expected
to be King.” Some have seen this as being a reference to
Prince Charles’s divorce from Princess Diana and the negative public sentiment which attached
itself to him as a result. Charles has recently ascended as King Charles
III of the United Kingdom and some have viewed this quatrain as being an indication that
he will be forced to abdicate perhaps in favour not of his eldest son, Prince William, the
designated heir, but his younger son, Prince Harry, a man “who never expected to be King.” Other quatrains have been identified which
seem to predict the war which has been in train in Ukraine since the spring of 2022
and even passages which predict the disastrous consequences of climate change. In the latter respect the quatrains referring
to the sun becoming so hot that the Black Sea will boil are particularly relevant, with
Nostradamus consequently predicting that the denizens of the Mediterranean and nearby regions
would be starved owing to the changing weather patterns. Of course all of this raises a question: if
Nostradamus allegedly predicted so many of these era-defining historical events, then
what might his Prophecies have had to say about events to come in the twenty-first or
twenty-second centuries? The portents are mixed. NASA and Elon Musk might be disappointed to
learn that Nostradamus poured cold water on the idea of a successful colonisation of Mars,
stating that, quote “the light of Mars will go out.” He also, somewhat worryingly, seemed to predict
a great war would break out in 2023, but that it would only last for seven months. But perhaps the most disturbing quatrain of
all predicts a break down in the global food chain and the advent of a real life version
of The Walking Dead. In what must surely be one of his most upsetting
quatrains, Nostradamus informs us that, quote, “So high will the bushel of wheat rise that
man will be eating his fellow man.” Thus, Nostradamus’s predictions of future
events are not for the faint-hearted and should probably be avoided by anyone with an overt-tendency
towards panic shopping. A major issue which needs to be taken into
consideration when assessing Nostradamus’s prophecies is their inherent vagueness. This was not just in terms of the esoteric,
rhyming language used, but also in terms of other methods Nostradamus employed to deliberately
shroud what he was saying. The Frenchman was writing at a time when charges
of being a prophet or proponent of dark magic could bring about charges of heresy, an experience
which Nostradamus had already had in the 1530s and which he had no wish to repeat. Accordingly, when he wrote the Prophecies
he used a mix of different languages including French, Provencal, Italian, Latin and Greek
in a deliberate effort to disguise what he was saying in places and allay any doubts
that he was an agent of the devil. Moreover, some specific place-names and other
words which he employed can be interpreted in a completely tangential fashion. Such is the case with his reference to ‘Rousseau’
in one instance, which analysts have taken to refer to the eighteenth-century Swiss philosopher,
but Rousseau was hardly an uncommon name in the Provence region in the sixteenth century. More tellingly, many analysts have insisted
that Nostradamus’s reference to ‘Hister’ in Germany in one of his quatrains prophesied
the rise of Adolf Hitler. That is until such time as we consider that
‘Hister’ was simply a name for the lower part of the River Danube in the sixteenth
century. Thus, in addition to Nostradamus’s Prophecies
being incredibly vague, there are manifold issues with how modern readers have read them
without any awareness of the sixteenth-century context in which they were written or indeed
the many classical and literary allusions which are contained within them. One final point which should be noted concerning
the overall structure and content of the Prophecies and indeed their vagueness is the lack of
specific dates. One would think that in a collection which
set out to provide prophecies of future events that it would be necessary to provide a great
many dates. But in actuality, for the period between 1588
and the year 3797 Nostradamus only references nine specific dates. Subsequent readers have sought to suggest
that other elements of the text make it possible to identify the general period in which an
event would occur, such as the reference to the Great Fire of London which occurred in
1666. However, there is no doubt that the lack of
dates is a serious issue when evaluating Nostradamus’s work. He himself explained this away as being a
product of the book’s cyclical notion of time, one in which the events of the past
when the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans ruled the Mediterranean, through to his own day,
and centuries into the future, all had a kind of timeless quality in which wars, natural
disasters and political swings to and fro were repeated, but despite his statements
about what he called “transmutations of time” Nostradamus was simply adding an additional
layer of vagueness and uncertainty to his text by generally refusing to add any details
that could tie his prophetic events to a specific year or date in the future. Curiously for a text which has gone on to
become one of the most instantly recognisable works of the last half a millennium, the Prophecies
were not initially well received when the centuries of them were published in Lyon in
1555. Such was the esoteric nature of Nostradamus’s
writings and the portents of doom contained within them that many people suspected him
of being a proponent of dark magic or an occultist. Michel may have been concerned enough by the
suspicions raised at this time that it led to him burning several of the more controversial
texts which he held in his study in Salon. However, despite the tepid initial reaction,
his publishers agreed to continue publishing additional centuries of quatrains in the years
that followed and as sales picked up additional editions were published in Paris. The work, which Nostradamus intended to run
to ten full centuries, amounting to a thousand quatrains, was never finished in its entirety. Nostradamus’s death prior to completing
the work in the mid-1560s would ensure that. But it was very close to completion and so
in 1568 the first full volume of 942 quatrains was published. It has been speculated that a small number
of previously unpublished quatrains which were added into this full edition of 1568
were the work of another writer, but in any event the overwhelming majority were indisputably
the work of Nostradamus and form the basis of his Prophecies such as they have been read,
studied and commented on ever since. The almanacs and the Prophecies were not Nostradamus’s
only written output in his later years. Amongst his other works is a text which he
composed at some date in the 1550s on Egyptian hieroglyphs. Entitled the Oros Apollo, the text comprises
182 verse epigrams and concerns the nature of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the system of symbols
and pictograms which were used as a written language in Pharaonic Egypt between the third
and first millennia BC. Nostradamus’s work was almost entirely based
on the Hieroglyphica written by Horapollon of Manthius, a Greek scholar who lived in
Egypt in the fifth century AD at a time when the Eastern Roman Empire still held sway here
and Alexandria, the capital of Egypt in the north of the country at the time, was still
one of the world’s great centres of learning, though in decline. Nostradamus had presumably relied on a translation
of Horapollon’s work from Greek into Latin which had been completed some years earlier
by a French scholar by the name of Jean Mercier. Nostradamus did add some of his own commentaries
briefly throughout the text. What is unusual about these is that to the
world of sixteenth-century France ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were a complete mystery. They would not be translated successfully
until the nineteenth century following the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon’s
forces in Egypt at the end of the 1790s. It is interesting, though, that the French
astrologer and seer, whose writings were so consumed with esoteric knowledge, showed an
interest in a secret, indecipherable language of the ancient past. Nor was this his only other work. In line with his long experience as an apothecary,
physician and plague doctor, Nostradamus also composed a number of works in the 1550s on
medical topics. The principal such text was a work on cosmetics
and medicines published in 1555. This was referred to as a ‘cookbook’,
included recipes for preserves, and is a good example of the peculiar manner in which the
preparation of medicines could overlap in the sixteenth century with other pursuits. Whether one was making health foods or cosmetics
all involved ingredients derived from nature and thus could often have strikingly similar
properties. For instance, a recipe early on in Nostradamus’s
text was for nutmeg oil, an ingredient which was variously used for medicines, makeup and
for cooking with. Elsewhere in the text Nostradamus provided
details of how to clean and whiten one’s teeth or to make an aphrodisiac. Around the same time he was also working on
a paraphrased translation of the Protreptic, a medical text written by the ancient Roman
physician Galen over a millennium earlier. Thus, what should be clear from all of this
is that while Nostradamus is almost entirely remembered for his Prophecies today, he was
working on a wide array of written texts and translation on many different matters in the
1550s. All this scholarly work and published output
soon increased Nostradamus’s fame in France beyond what he had ever enjoyed as a successful
plague doctor back in the 1530s and 40s. Eventually Nostradamus’s range of admirers
stretched all the way to the royal court in Paris. Back in 1533 the heir to the throne, Prince
Francis, had married Catherine de Medici, a scion of the powerful Florentine banking
and political family. Eventually in 1547 she became Queen consort
of France when Francis ascended as King Francis II. Catherine brought a Renaissance Italian’s
love of astrology and almanacs with her to France in 1555 and, after coming across Nostradamus’s
almanac for that year, she summoned the Provencal seer and doctor to Paris. One of the quatrains in his almanac for that
year hinted at a threat to the royal family and she wished to learn more. Though initially fearful for his life, he
was received warmly by the queen. Thereafter she regularly corresponded with
him seeking advice about future events. Then following her husband’s death in an
unfortunate jousting accident in 1559 she effectively became regent for her sons who
were still too young to rule in their own stead. Catherine’s faith in the Provence seer’s
prophetic abilities was cemented by that time. Nostradamus had after all written in one of
his quatrains a few years earlier that, quote, “the young lion will overcome the older
one”, and that it would come about by a ruler being pierced through the eye, a prophecy
which became highly relevant when Catherine’s husband was killed by having a piece of a
joust break off and penetrate into his eye and his brain. Thus it was that under Catherine’s patronage
in the 1560s Nostradamus was promoted to the positions of a royal counsellor and also as
physician-in-ordinary to the young King Charles IX. This brought Nostradamus an additional pension
and some considerable protection against any charges of engaging in heresy or dark magic
thereafter. A sign of his growing affluence was seen in
his and his wife’s investment in a scheme launched in 1556 by the French engineer, Adam
de Craponne, to build an extensive 25 kilometre canal to bring water from the River Durance
to Salon-de-Provence with the goal of irrigating what was a region prone to summer droughts. The Nostredames owned a one-thirteenth share
in the endeavour and it proved to be so successful that de Craponne subsequently extended the
canal all the way north to the River Rhone and south to near the Mediterranean coastline
at Istres. As a result of this, as well as his many pensions
which accrued over the years for his work as a plague doctor and a physician along with
the royalties from his growing body of published works, the Nostredame family were able to
live a relatively comfortable life in Salon-de-Provence in the 1550s and 1560s, though he, his wife
and six children remained in the same small house in the town, which is still standing
today and which indicates that his was no lavish existence by any means. By the 1560s Michel was suffering from increasingly
ill health. His primary affliction was gout, a type of
arthritis which manifests in periodic bouts of painful inflammation of the joints. Despite his patronage by the royal family,
he experienced one last clash with the church authorities in the early 1560s when he was
briefly imprisoned at Marignane on the orders of the local bishop. However, this was not on account of any charges
of heresy or occultism, but rather because he had failed to acquire the necessary permission
from the local church authorities before publishing one of his almanacs. Such permissions were increasingly necessary
in a country where the church authorities were anxious to screen any works for hints
of religious dissent as France descended into a series of religious wars in the early 1560s
which would last for the next four decades. By the mid-1560s Nostradamus’s illness had
deteriorated to the point where his gout was causing oedema, a disease which results in
major fluid retention and then swelling around the body and which in a chronic state can
severely impact on one’s mobility. In the summer of 1566 his situation had deteriorated
to the extent that he put his legal and financial affairs in order through his will. His estate, which he bequeathed to his wife
and children, was substantial, though not lavish. He died shortly afterwards, either on the
night of the 1st of July 1566 or the early morning of the 2nd. The story which was related afterwards, that
he had told his private secretary, Jean de Chavigny, the evening beforehand that he would
not find him alive at sunrise, seems a little too good to be true, though no doubt such
a prophetic prediction of his own demise did nothing to harm sales of the first full edition
of the Prophecies when it appeared two years later. He was buried in the Franciscan church in
the town of Salon. Nostradamus’s tomb has had a strange afterlife
which has reflected the Provencal prophet’s own rather peculiar afterlife as a writer. When he died in 1566 he was interred standing
upright in the Church of the Cordeliers of Salon in Salon-de-Provence. There he rested for over 130 years until in
1700 the town council determined to move his body to a more prominent crypt in recognition
of his lasting fame. During the process of doing so a necklace
was found on his skeleton bearing the inscription ‘1700’. The townspeople quickly reinterred him following
this ominous revelation, the details of which may have been elaborated. He rested again for 91 years before a group
of soldiers from the French Revolutionary period drunkenly broke into his tomb in 1791. The tomb was only restored following the intervention
of the town mayor who convinced the soldiers that Nostradamus had not been a nobleman. Nostradamus had the last laugh however as
he had once foretold that “Evil will come” to “The man who opens the tomb.” The soldiers were apparently attacked by some
counter-revolutionary forces not far from Salon and killed to a man. It is a fitting end to the strange intersection
of fate and the Prophecies of Michel de Nostredame. Over the centuries views regarding Nostradamus’s
reputation have varied markedly. For much of the time since his death in 1566
attitudes towards his writings were positive. For people living through the calamities of
the wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries his talk of kingdoms
experiencing disaster after disaster resonated. His reputation was enhanced following the
Great Fire of London, which was noted as being a first major event that he clearly seemed
to have predicted. Unsurprisingly, new editions of the Prophecies
continued to appear. There have been over 200 editions of the work
since the sixteenth century in many different languages and it is one of the best-selling
books of the last five centuries by this standard. Sales were particularly strong during periods
of crisis when fans of the French plague doctor dipped in and out of his writings in search
of supposedly prescient remarks on coming misfortunes. This high regard for Nostradamus reached its
peak in the twentieth century when his writings were picked up on as having predicted Hitler,
the nuclear bombs and the Kennedy assassination. Quacks emerged in tandem, with authors of
books on Nostradamus making claims that they could communicate with the Frenchman from
beyond the grave through hypnosis. Many twentieth century books on him were reflective
of the interest in dark magic and occultism that peaked between the 1960s and 1980s. As well as this, elements of Nostradamus’s
life story became exaggerated or entirely fabricated. Recently a more stark realism has set in and
several studies have appeared since the 1990s which attempt to refute the idea of Nostradamus
as a genuine prophet and instead highlight the vague, unspecific nature of his predictions. Today Nostradamus is a major figure in popular
culture. Very few people have ever sat down to read
a copy of his Prophecies, yet at the same time, very few people are unaware of who the
sixteenth-century French prophet was. His name conjures up the idea of a long lost
seer who predicted regular periods of doom gripping humanity in centuries to come. Accordingly his imprint on popular culture
is extremely wide, with dozens of best-selling books having been written on the Provencal
astrologer, as well as hundreds of television shows and documentaries relating to his prophecies
and how they have been interpreted. Several films have even been made about Michel
de Nostredame, including a short film nominated for an Academy Award in 1941, and a feature
length documentary narrated by Orson Welles in 1981. The title of the latter, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow,
gives a flavour of how Nostradamus is usually depicted in modern popular culture. More recently the French plague doctor has
even popped up as a figure in the Assassin’s Creed series of video games, with a character
having to solve a series of riddles in Paris allegedly created by Nostradamus. Thus, the ways in which Nostradamus has featured
in popular culture down to the present day is as varied as the manner in which his writings
can be interpreted. Michel de Nostredame’s writings have certainly
fascinated readers for centuries. His life story itself is rather less examined
and indeed, as we have seen, there are substantial sections of it for which there is an almost
total lack of detail, particularly so in his earlier years. What is perhaps most striking about what we
do know about him is that he did not have any special background at all in astrology
or the dark arts of any kind which would have facilitated his writings. Rather his principal profession during his
working life was as a physician and a plague doctor. He acquired quite a considerable reputation
for his work in southern France, but in reality his abilities in this field were more to do
with his common-sense approach to sanitation than any alleged efficacy conveyed by his
‘rose pills’. But what was perhaps more notable about his
work as a plague doctor was that it afforded him enough financial success in the 1530s
and 40s that he was able to dedicate himself largely to writing in the 1550s and 60s. Secondly, it led to him travelling widely
and coming into contact with scholars who broadened his literary range. But thirdly, and perhaps more importantly,
this life as a plague doctor, who saw death and devastation wherever he went, must have
imbued Nostradamus with a deep sense of foreboding and dread, or certainly at least a preoccupation
with death and destruction. This preoccupation is surely the most defining
characteristic of the Prophecies. A casual reader of the hundreds of quatrains
which Nostradamus published in the 1550s and 60s will not be greeted by an overtly positive
array of rhymes, but rather continuous portents of death, hell, destruction, fire, droughts,
famines and plagues. This was Nostradamus’s stock and trade and
surely what has held the attention of so many people ever since. Had he written hundreds of quatrains on topics
such as boat-building or dress-making they would most likely have been forgotten about
a long time ago. But the pre-occupation with death and destruction,
along with the inherently vague and esoteric manner in which the Prophecies were written,
have ensured that they have survived the test of time. Nearly five centuries after they were written
men and women still pore over the quatrains of doom seeking hints and predictions of future
apocalyptic events. And such was the manner in which Nostradamus
wrote his verse that given a long enough time an event can nearly always be found to correspond
to a passage. What do you think of Nostradamus? Do you think his writings were prophetic or
were they just ambiguous enough that subsequent generations have been able to read an enormous
amount into them? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
