Every time a dramatic event occurs, someone rediscovers a quatrain by Nostradamus that seems to have foretold it. This fame, which has lasted almost five centuries, has ended up obscuring the real man: a sixteenth-century Provençal physician and astrologer, the author of annual almanacs, of a treatise on cosmetics and preserves, and of a collection of obscure verses that was an immediate success. Reconstructing his story helps us understand both his time and the way we read prophecies.
Origins and training
Michel de Nostredame was born in December 1503 at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. His father's family descended from Jewish merchants who had converted to Christianity in the fifteenth century and taken the surname Nostredame.
He studied at Avignon, but his studies were interrupted by an outbreak of plague. For some years he travelled, working as an apothecary and preparer of remedies. In 1529 he enrolled in the faculty of medicine at Montpellier; a surviving document records that he was expelled shortly afterwards, precisely because he had practised as an apothecary, a trade considered incompatible with student status. It is not certain that he ever took a doctorate, although he always presented himself as a physician afterwards.
The plague doctor
In the 1540s Nostradamus worked in various Provençal towns during plague epidemics, including Aix-en-Provence in 1546. In 1547 he settled at Salon-de-Provence, where he married a well-off widow and had several children. He lived there until his death.
In 1555 he published a book that surprises those who know only the prophet: the Traité des fardemens et confitures, a treatise on cosmetics, perfumes and preserves, with recipes for jams and conserves. It is an interesting document of Renaissance material culture.
The almanacs
From around 1550 Nostradamus began publishing annual almanacs: small books with a calendar, weather and astrological forecasts, advice for farming and short predictions in prose and verse. Almanacs were an extremely popular and profitable genre, and his were so successful that other authors imitated and counterfeited them under his name.
This activity made him famous throughout France, but also brought him criticism: better-trained astrologers accused him of errors in his calculations, and some poets mocked him.
The Prophecies
In 1555 the first edition of the Prophéties appeared in Lyon, from the publisher Macé Bonhomme. It contained 353 quatrains, that is four-line stanzas, grouped in "centuries" of a hundred, preceded by a letter to his newborn son César. Later editions enlarged the collection, and the posthumous edition of 1568 contains almost a thousand quatrains in ten centuries.
The quatrains share some constant features:
- they are deliberately obscure, with mythological allusions, anagrams, and Latin and Greek words;
- they almost never contain explicit dates and follow no chronological order;
- they often speak of wars, plagues, floods, deaths of kings and religious conflicts, themes omnipresent in sixteenth-century France;
- in some writings Nostradamus stated that he drew his visions from astrological calculations and from a form of divine inspiration.
Catherine de' Medici and the court
The success of the almanacs caught the attention of Queen Catherine de' Medici, who summoned him to Paris in 1555. In 1564, during the young Charles IX's great tour of France, the queen and the king visited Nostradamus at Salon, and the king appointed him counsellor and physician-in-ordinary. Nostradamus died at Salon in July 1566.
The problem of interpretation
After his death the Prophecies became the object of continuous interpretation. Already in the sixteenth century the idea spread that a quatrain had announced the death of Henry II, wounded in a tournament in 1559. In the following centuries the same quatrains were applied to the French Revolution, Napoleon, the world wars and many other events.
The decisive historical point is that all these correspondences were found after the events. The very obscurity of the verses allows them to be fitted to very different events, and different interpreters have often assigned the same quatrain to mutually incompatible facts. No verifiable prediction, formulated before the event with precise dates and names, has ever been successfully drawn from the Prophecies. There are also false quatrains, invented in later periods and attributed to Nostradamus.
This does not deprive the figure of historical value: Nostradamus is a precious witness to the fears, the apocalyptic expectations and the astrological culture of his century. Reading him as a sixteenth-century document is far more fruitful than looking for a chronicle of the future in him.
In short
- Michel de Nostredame (1503-1566) was a Provençal apothecary, physician and astrologer.
- He worked during plague epidemics and published highly successful annual almanacs.
- The Prophecies (1555) are obscure quatrains, without dates or chronological order.
- The correspondences with historical events were all found in hindsight.
