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[1]
Original 1555 text
ESTANT assis [/] de nuict secret estude,
Seul repousé sus la selle d’aerain,
Flambe exigue sortant de solitude,
Faict proferer qui n’est à croire vain.
English translation
Seated, he studies secretly at night,
‘On tripod bronze’, at ease, alone again:
A tiny, lonely flame that shines so bright
Makes utter what none should believe in vain.
Source:
The fourth-century Iamblichus’s De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum, as reprinted in Latin by Petrus Crinitus in his De honesta disciplina of 1504, republished in Lyon by Gryphius in 1552, and almost certainly in Nostradamus’s personal library, given the frequency with which he quotes from it (and the fact that his son César would report as much): ‘The prophetess at Delphi . . . being seated in the inner shrine on a bronze seat [super sedem aeneam] having three or four legs . . .  used to expose herself to the divine spirit, whence she was illuminated with a ray of divine fire [radio divini ignis].’ Nostradamus is evidently evoking the Delphic oracle in the hope of impressing the reader with his own prophetic credentials.




[2]
Original 1555 text
Vers Aquitaine par insults Britanniques,
De par eux mesmes grandes incursions.
Pluies, gelées feront terroirs iniques,
Port Selyn fortes fera invasions.
Engliash translation
British campaigns towards fair Aquitaine,
And by them too, shall mighty inroads make:
Hostile the lands are made by ice and rain.
At Lunar Port shall great invasions break.
Source:
Presumably Froissart’s account in his Chroniques of John of Gaunt’s hugely destructive rampage right across France from Calais towards the English-held territory of Aquitaine during 1373 in the course of the Hundred Years’ War, involving a terrible passage through the mountains of the Auvergne in the depths of winter. The expedition cost Gaunt dearly, who lost nearly half his army through cold and starvation before the survivors finally reached the safety of Bordeaux, whose curving riverfront area is known to this day as the ‘Port de la Lune’.





[3]
Original 1555 text
Cela du reste de sang non espandu:
Venise quiert secours estre donné:
Apres avoir bien long temps attendu.
Cité livrée au premier corn sonné.
English translation
For what of blood shall not yet have been shed,
Venice demands that aid be sent at last:
But after having waited long unfed
The city’s yielded at first trumpet blast.
Source:
The war of 1499 to 1503 between Venice and the Ottoman Turks, possibly assimilated to the Mirabilis Liber’s promised Muslim invasion of Europe via Italy: see I.9, I.75. In April 1500, the Sultan Bayezid demanded that Venice hand over Modon, Coron, and Napoli di Romania to the Turks, and indicated that he would wait sixty days before attacking. During those sixty days of unshed blood, Venice urgently searched for allies, especially as, following a Turkish attack earlier in the year, the city of Modon had not been sufficiently provisioned to withstand a long siege. But it was all in vain. At the very moment when the Turks were about to give up, Venetian supply ships managed to break the blockade, the citizens and troops of Modon were so eager to unload them that the walls were left undefended, the Turks promptly attacked and the city was overrun.





[4]
Original 1555 text
Tard arrivé l’execution faicte
Le vent contraire, letres au chemin prinses
Les conjures. xiiij. dune secte
Par le Rosseau senez les entreprinses.
English translation
Lately arrived, the execution’s done
(Against the odds, and letters oft derouted).
Fourteen the plotters from one caste alone:
News of the project through a reed is bruited.
Source:
The De orbe novo (‘Concerning the New World’) of 1533 by the Italian historian Pietro Martire d’Anghiera (Peter Martyr), describing the dire results of the native desecration of a Franciscan chapel on Hispaniola during 1496, during Columbus’s absence in Spain (I.v, I.ix, VI.v). Reacting to the resulting savage repression, the uncomprehending caciques, or local chieftains, plotted a massacre of the Spanish occupiers. Columbus’s brother Bartolomé, the acting Governor, was hastily summoned from Santo Domingo by a letter hidden in a reed disguised as a messenger’s staff, since letters were otherwise liable to be intercepted as ‘magical objects’ by the inhabitants. In fact, the messenger was intercepted, but managed to talk his way out of trouble. At length Bartolomé arrived and, finding himself vastly outnumbered, organised an extremely selective surprise midnight raid on the native villages: ‘The Spaniards rushed into the huts where the chieftains were being lodged, seized and bound fourteen of them and rushed them away to the fortress before anybody could try and defend or rescue them.’ The two ringleaders were subsequently put to death and in this way the rebellion successfully quelled. By using the word secte (in this case presumably meaning no more than ‘caste’ or ‘class’) Nostradamus is nevertheless possibly suggesting a likely future religious application.





[5]
Original 1555 text
Le mineur filz du grand & hay prince,
De lepre aura à vingt ans grande tache:
De dueil sa mere mourra bien triste & mince.
Et il mourra la ou toumbe chet lache.
English translation
Of great and hated prince the lesser son
At twenty shall show signs of leprosy
(His grieving mother shall die sad and wan).
Where they to death hacked Becket, die shall he.
Source:
Froissart’s Chroniques and other documents describing at length the life and times of John of Gaunt (1340-99) and his family. Froissart relates in a long and famous passage the sad, lingering death of his mother Queen Philippa, wife of Edward III: ‘The good Queen of England... fell sick in the castle of Windsor, the which sickness continued in her so long that there was no remedy but death. And the good lady, when she knew and perceived that there was no remedy but death, desired to speak with the King her husband. And when he was before her she put out of her bed her right hand and took the King by his right hand, who was right sorrowful at heart. Then she said, “Sir, we have in peace, joy and great prosperity used all our time together. Sir, now, I pray you, at our departing, that ye will grant me three desires.” The King, right sorrowfully weeping, said, “Madam, desire what ye will, I grant it.”... Thus the good Queen of England died in the year of Our Lord 1369, in the Vigil of Our Lady in the middle of August.’ Gaunt, meanwhile, was indeed disliked in England and hated in France, and his fourth son, the future Henry IV, is known to have suffered from a leprosy-like illness for most of his life. In fact he eventually died from it, subsequently being buried, along with Gaunt’s brother the Black Prince, beside the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, scene of the archbishop’s notorious murder in 1170. Nostradamus would have been sharply reminded of this in late 1538 by news of the shock desecration of this most famous of European shrines in the course of Henry VIII’s brutal dissolution of the English monasteries, before which all Catholic Europe stood aghast at the time. The last line, which actually contains Becket’s original Norman French family name, seems to have suffered some pretty brutal abbreviation, possibly in order to allow the insertion of the first three words – and the evidently puzzled printer seems to have mutilated it as a result.




[6]
Original 1555 text
Celuy qu’aura gouvert de la grand cappe
Sera induict a quelque cas patrer:
Les XII. rouges viendront souiller la nappe
Sous meurtre, meutre se viendra perpetrer
English translation
He who rules o’er the mighty papacy
Shall be induced a crime to perpetrate.
Twelve cardinals their cloth shall sullied see:
Murder on murder shall the world await.
Source:
The appointment in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI of his own possibly illegitimate son Cesare Borgia as a leading administrator in papal affairs, largely as a result of the scandal arising from Alexander’s sale of twelve cardinals’ hats to the highest bidder in September of the same year. Cesare would subsequently be suspected of the murder of his own brother Giovanni, Duke of Gandia, in 1497, as well as of Perrotto, the Pope’s chamberlain, in 1498. Compare VI.50.




[7]
Original September 1557 text
Saturne & Mars en leo Espaigne captifve,
Par chef lybique au conflict attrapé:
Proche de Malthe, Heredde prinse vive,
Et Romain sceptre sera par coq frappé.
English translation
Saturn and Mars in Leo, held in Spain,
Caught by an Afric leader in a fight,
Near Marta shall Heredia live be ta’en
When Cock shall strike the Roman ruler's might.
Source: The temporary imprisonment in Spain in 1535 of Don Pedro de Heredia, Governor of Santa Marta in Colombia, for alleged embezzlement of Indian property. Both Saturn and Mars were in Leo from early November until mid-December. After the French took nearby Cartagena by surprise in 1543, he was again deposed and sent to Spain in a fleet which was lost at sea in 1555 off the African coast – though until this was established (the verse itself was written between 1555 and 1557) it may well have been assumed that he had been captured by North African pirates. If so, apparently the only one of Nostradamus's verses that refers to contemporary events on the American continent, assuming that ‘Americh’ in X.66 is, as I propose, a misprint (q.v.).




[8]
Original 1555 text (misnumbered ‘14’)
Un peu devant monarque trucidé?
Castor Pollux en nef, astre crinite.
L’erain publiq par terre & mer vuidé
Pise, Ast, Ferrare, Turin, terre interdicte.
English translation
Shortly before the monarch killed shall be,
To Twins by boat, a comet shall be seen.
State funds they shall exhaust by land and sea,
The lands cut off from Pisa to Turin.
Source:
The death by drowning of the young King Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia in 1526 while fleeing the Turkish Ottomans after his catastrophic defeat by them at the celebrated battle of Mohacs, on the right bank of the Danube. Thereafter, the Ottomans under Suleiman the Magnificent were able to cross the river, and reached and sacked the twin cities of Buda and Pest a fortnight later. This is naturally assimilated to the Mirabilis liber’s forecasts of a future Muslim invasion of Europe (see I.9, I.15, I.75) and, in the second half of the verse, of Italy in particular. The mention of a comet recalls other prophecies from it, too: ‘It has been given to the stars and meteors (for the stars cannot have been created in vain) to exert an influence on things here below‘ (Prophecy of Abbot Joachim da Fiore, quoting Aristotle): ‘In the sky shall be seen numerous and most surprising signs . . . ’ (Prophecy of Joannes de Vatiguerro). Compare Julius Obsequens’s On Omens (2) for 147 BC: ‘A star burned for thirty-two days’; (68) for 44 BC: ‘At the games of Venus the Generatrix. . . a bearded star that appeared at the eleventh hour towards the north drew all eyes . . . An extraordinary star burned for for seven days’. See also II.41 and II.43.





[9]
Original 1555 text (misnumbered ‘15’)
Naples, Palerme, Secille, Syracuses
Nouveaux tyrans, fulgures feuz celestes:
Force de Londres, Gand, Brucelles, & Suses
Grand hecatombe, triumphe, faire festes.
English translation
Naples, Palermo, Sicilian Syracusa –
New rulers rule, fires flash aloft the sky:
A seaborne force from Gent, Brussels and Susa
Great games, a triumph, feasts for all supply.
Source:
Apparently the Annales Cassini (the annals of the great Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino) for 1194, recording the conquest of formerly Muslim Sicily from the Normans by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI: ‘After raising an army, the Emperor entered Italy in June. He prepared a fleet at Pisa and Genoa and, embarking, descended upon the kingdom. Everywhere surrendered to him apart from Atina and Roccaguglielmo…The Neapolitans had already surrendered by arrangement with the Pisans. The Emperor marched on and stormed Salerno... When they realised this, the people of Palermo acclaimed the emperor… He then made haste to Palermo, entered it with great magnificence and was welcomed at the palace’. This is presumably assimilated to the Mirabilis Liber’s prediction of the liberation of Europe from its future Muslim occupiers (see I.55 above), with the Holy Roman Empire once again seen as the eventual saviour, and with ‘Susa’ included with the Empire’s important cities in line three more for its rhyming properties than anything else. The flashes of fire in the sky appear to be no more than celebratory fireworks, which dated from the time of the Crusades: compare the ‘games, rites, feasts’ also mentioned in line 3 of VII.22. ‘Tyrant’ was simply the original title of the rulers of Syracuse, as of many other ancient Greek city states. Compare VI.97.





[10]
Original text of 1568 edition
Les bien aisez subit seront desmis
Par les trois freres le monde mis en trouble,
Cité marine saisiront ennemis,
Faim, feu, sang, peste, & de to9 maux le double.
English translation
Put down the well-to-do shall quickly be:
By brothers three the world is sorely troubled.
The foes shall seize each city of the sea:
Hunger, fire, blood and plague – all ills redoubled.
Source:
Possibly an early manuscript of Nostradamus’s younger brother Jehan's So que s'est pogut reculhir des comtes de Provensa... depuis... DCCC jusqu'as... MCCCCLXXXI (in Provencal) and/or what is reported as une suyte de chronique de Provence, which were eventually published sometime after 1575 (and both of which were later plundered by the seer’s son César for his Histoire et Chronique de Provence of 1614) detailing the catastrophic disintegration of the Carolingian empire following its division by the treaty of Verdun of AD 843 between the three sons of Charlemagne's heir Louis I – namely Louis the German, Charles the Bald and Lothair I. While these ‘three brothers’ were busy fighting it out among themselves (as would be detailed by César, at least), Western Europe was murderously attacked by three other ‘brothers’ – the Vikings from the north, the plundering Magyars from the east and the Muslim Saracens from the south. The symbolic parallelism can hardly have escaped Nostradamus – whence, presumably, the expression de tous maux le double in the last line. The last of these invaders laid waste many Mediterranean cities including Naples and Genoa – to such an extent that, when the Vikings later reached the Mediterranean (sacking further maritime cities such as Paris, Nantes and Toulouse on the way), they had to penetrate even further inland to find anything worth sacking at all. In view of their relevance to the Mirabilis Liber's theme of coming Muslim invasion, the Saracen invasions seem likely to be the ones primarily referred to by Nostradamus here. The first line vaguely echoes both Luke 1:52-3 and Virgil’s famous expression debellare superbos (‘to subdue the proud’) in Book VI of his Aeneid (line 853).




[11]
Original 1555 text
Par la discorde negligence Gauloyse,
Sera passaige à Mahommet ouvert:
De sang trempé la terre & mer Senoyse
Le port Phocen de voiles & nefs couvert.
English translation
Through negligence and discord French shall be
To Muslim forces passage free allowed:
Genoa bloodsoaked both by land and sea,
And sails and ships shall Marseille’s harbour crowd.
Source:
The Mirabilis liber’s forecast of a massive Muslim invasion of Europe by sea (see I.9), combined with François I’s surprise 1543 alliance with the Ottomans that allowed their fleets to overwinter at Toulon and Marseille, their crews virtually occupying both ports. As for line 3, a similar confusion between ‘Siena’ and ‘Genoa’ seems to occur at I.75, whether as a result of the text’s dictation aloud in a noisy printing-house or because Nostradamus’s capital ‘G’ and ‘S’ were rather similar.




[12]
Original 1555 text
Six jours l’assaut devant cité donné:
Livrée sera forte & aspre bataille:
Trois la rendront & à eux pardonné:
Le reste a feu & sang tranche traille.
English translation
Six days before the town they’ll sound th’ assault,
Then battle shall be joined both strong and grim.
Three who it yield shall pardoned be sans fault,
The rest ’midst blood and fire cut limb from limb.
Source:
Possibly the Gesta francorum et aliorum Hierosolymytanorum of around 1101, describing the siege of Jerusalem in 1099 during the First Crusade. The attack proper, which began six days after the army had ritually processed around the city barefoot to the sound of trumpets somewhat after the manner of the biblical siege of Jericho, lasted just over a day, and was ferocious in the extreme. The inhabitants were impartially slaughtered, the Jews burnt to death in their main synagogue. Apart from those commandeered as slaves, only the city's Arab governor, Iftikhar ad-Daula, and his bodyguard were spared after they had shut themselves in the Tower of David and from there negotiated with Raymond de St Gilles, Count of Toulouse, to surrender the city. Presumably the incident is assimilated to the Mirabilis Liber’s predictions of a massive future Christian counter-invasion of Arab-occupied Europe and the Middle East: see I.55.




[13]
Original September 1557 text
D’esprit de regne munismes descriees,
Et seront peuples esmeuz contre leur Roy:
Faix, faict nouveau, sainctes loix empirees,
Rapis onc fut en si tresdur arroy.
English translation
The coinage shall a power-freak debase,
And folk against their King they shall incite.
Novelties, new faiths holy laws abase –
Ne’er knew rapacious Paris such a plight!
Source:
A variety of dire developments from the 1530s onwards, including the activities of the rascally and quite extraordinarily rich Chancellor, Papal Legate, quintuple bishop and Cardinal Archbishop of Sens Antoine Duprat (in 1534 he even allegedly angled for the papacy), who was suspected in 1530 of adulterating money (i.e. filing down gold coins and/or replacing them with inferior alloys) from the huge ransom collected for the release of King François I from imprisonment in Spain (see, IV.88, VIII.14 and possibly VI.9), and whose vast properties were (significantly, perhaps) expropriated by the king immediately after his death from phtyriasis and gangrene in 1535. All this is then reflected, by way of an ‘omen’, in Nostradamus’s horror at the dangerous ‘new ideas’ (and especially the religious ones) that were then threatening (similarly) to adulterate traditional religious values and debase the existing social order, as well as by the Mirabilis Liber’s predictions of fatal religious decay: see I.44, II.10, II.12. Indeed, the last line, which seems to refer darkly not only to the collection of King François I’s ruinous ransom (and perhaps that of his sons too) but also to the enormous tax demands regularly imposed by his successor King Henri II to pay for his wars, even suggests a certain sense of ‘and it serves you right!’





[14]
Original 1555 text
Bestes farouches [/] de faim fluves tranner:
Plus part du camp encontre Hister sera,
En caige de fer le grand fera treisner,
Quand Rin enfant [/] Germain observera.
English translation
Like wild beasts famished they’ll the rivers ford,
Towards lower Danube looms the greater fight:
While in an iron cage they’ll drag one lord,
The German one the young Rhine has in sight.
Source:
The De Varietate Fortunae of around 1430 by the leading Renaissance humanist, researcher of ancient texts and Apostolic secretary Gianfrancesco (or Giovanni Francesco) Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), better known as Poggius, starkly contrasting the fates of two prominent warring rulers. After utterly defeating an anti-Ottoman Christian crusade under King Sigismund of Hungary at the battle of Nicopolis on the banks of the Danube in 1396, and thereby striking terror into western Europe, the Sultan Bayezid I (also known as Bajazet) was defeated in turn by Tamburlaine the Great near Ankara in 1402 when he over-confidently encroached on the latter's domains in Anatolia. In Poggio’s words, Tamburlaine ‘took the ruler alive and lugged him all over Asia Minor enclosed in a cage like a wild beast as a public spectacle and to show what Fortune can do.’ He died shortly afterwards. Sigismund, meanwhile, who had only just escaped his defeat at Nicopolis by the skin of his teeth, went on to become King of Germany in 1411, and in 1414 called for and personally attended a major church Council (of which Poggio himself was official secretary) at Constance, at the very source of the Rhine, designed to heal the Great Western Church Schism to which Nostradamus so often refers elsewhere (see I.32, V.46, V.92, VI.13, VII.22, VII.23 and VII.35), and which notably resulted the following year in the trial and burning of the Czech religious reformer Jan Hus. Note Nostradamus’s usual coupling of Rhine and Danube, which had at one time formed the northeastern frontier of the Roman Empire. For line 1, compare the Mirabilis Liber’s frequent warnings of a future ‘barbarian’ (i.e. Muslim) invasion of Europe: ‘Prediction of a severe persecution visited on the Church by the Barbarians . . . Their rage against the Christians of the north and of the west shall surpass the ferocity of all the cruellest beasts . . .’ (Prophecy of Reynard Lolhardus, quoted from chapter 26 of Part 2 of Lichtenberger’s Prognosticatio of 1488).




[15]
Original 1555 text
Qui au royaume Navarrois parviendra
Quand de Secile & naples seront joints:
Bigorre & Landes par Foyx Loron tiendra,
D’un qui d’Hespaigne sera par trop conjoint
English translation
He who the kingdom of Navarre reigns o’er
When Sicily and Naples are allied,
Through Foix, Oloron the Landes holds and Bigorre
From one who’ll be too much on th’ Spanish side.
Source:
Contemporary dynastic politics. In 1516 the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V took over Navarre in his capacity as king of Spain and heir to the kingdom of Aragon. By the same token he was ruler of Sicily and Naples as well. In the same year, Henri d’Albret assumed titular sovereignty over northern (French) Navarre as Henri II of Navarre under the protection of King François I of France, having already inherited through his parents Catherine de Foix and Jean d’Albret both the duchy of Albret, (situated in the Landes) and that of Foix (which included Bigorre). This situation finally became formalised in 1531, when the Spanish monarchy gave up its right to Lower Navarre.




[16]
Original September 1557 text
La gent esclave par un heur martial,
Viendra en hault degré tant eslevee:
Changeront prince, naistre un provincial,
Passer la mer copie aux montz levee.
English translation
By warlike fortune shall the slavish race
Become raised up unto a high degree.
One rustic-born their monarch shall replace.
His army, mountain-raised, shall cross the sea.
Source:
Probably Marinus Barletius’s Historia de vita et gestis Scanderbegi Epirotarum Principis (Rome, Bernardinus de Vitalibus, 1508-1510), describing the military successes enjoyed by the Albanians led by George Castriot Swinamed, the former enslaved son of an Albanian prince and a Serbian princess, in resisting the powerful Ottoman advance into Europe under the Sultan Murad II (1403-51). Named ‘Athleta Christi’ by the Papal States, and renamed ‘Scanderberg’ (i.e. ‘Alexander Bey’) by the Turks, he turned against them in 1443 and defeated them the following year after uniting the Albanian princes at the League of Lezhe (1444). Thereafter he sent detachments of Albanian mountain-raised troops to Italy to help Alfonso of Aragon, King of Naples, suppress rebellious rural feudal barons. In 1461, after an appeal from King Ferdinand of Naples, Scanderbeg himself landed at Brindisi with five thousand soldiers, and was appointed commander of the combined Neapolitan-Albanian armies that defeated the baronial army at the battle of Ursara on 18 August 1462, thus ending the revolt.





[17]
Original September 1557 text
Par feu & armes non loing de la marnegro,
Viendra de Perse occuper Trebisonde:
Trembler Phatos Methelin, Sol alegro,
De sang Arabe d’Adrie couvert unde.
English translation
Near the Black Sea, by fire and weapons gained,
He’ll come from Persia Trebizond to take.
Christians rejoice, Paros and Lesbos quake:
With Arab blood the Adriatic’s stained.
Source:
The Mirabilis liber’s prophecy of a massive counter-invasion by the Western powers of the Muslim heartlands in the Middle East (see I.55) by a future Grand Monarque of France (see I.4, I.92). Compare VII.36 below.





[18]
Original 1555 text
L’oriental sortira de son siege,
Passer les monts Apennins, voir la Gaule:
Transpercera du ciel les eaux & neige:
Et un chascun frapera de sa gaule.
English translation
Forth from his seat the Easterner shall go:
To cross the Apennines, to see fair Gaul.
Onward he’ll press through local rains and snow
And with his rod he’ll strike both one and all.
Source:
Various ancient accounts of the campaigns of Attila the Hun (known as ‘The Scourge of God’) ranging from Priscus’s History, via Cassiodorus’s Historia ecclesiastica tripartita and Jornandes’ (or Jordanis’) De Reb. Geticis (or De Origine Actibusque Getarum), to Gregory of Tours’ 6th-century Historia Francorum. A Latin edition of Cassiodorus in particular (the basic account) had been published by Johannes Froben of Basel in 1523, and republished in 1528, 1535, 1539 and 1544, as had the Greek original by Robert Estienne of Paris in 1544. In line with some of the earlier chroniclers such as Jordanis, Nostradamus has seemingly placed Attila’s invasion of Gaul (where he was defeated at the epic Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, near Orléans, in AD 451) before his invasion of Italy (from where he eventually withdrew—according to some accounts after an overwhelming personal encounter with Pope Leo I near Mantua, but more likely as a simple result of plague and famine). After Attila had crossed the eastern Alps from Hungary early in 452 (as apparently described in line 3), ‘Italy was overrun and plundered,’ as Gregory puts it. Indeed, Attila had fully intended to cross the Apennines in turn since, as Jordanis points out, ‘Attila’s mind had been set on going to Rome’—whence, of course, the Pope’s intervention. The whole is then evidently projected by Nostradamus into the future as a presage of the future Antichrist. See I.9, I.15 and compare the verse’s ‘twin’ at V.54.




[19]
Original 1555 text
La nef estrange par le tourment marin
Abourdera pres de port incongneu,
Nonobstant signes de rameau palmerin
Apres mort, pille: bon avis tard venu.
English translation
The foreign ship from o’er the raging sea
At port unknown shall land from out the main
’Spite palm-fronds’ signs of man’s propinquity.
After death, pillage: later, they’ll think again!
Source:
Probably Grynaeus and Huttich's Novus Orbis Regionum ac Insularum Veteribus Incognitarum, detailing the voyages of Columbus and other contemporary explorers, and published in Paris in 1532, plus a so-far-unidentified printing of the explorer’s logs. His entry for 26th May 1494, on entering Cuba's Bay of Pigs during his second expedition, reads: 'No people appeared, but there were signs of their presence in cut-down palms.’ This rather spooky situation seems to have aroused something of a frisson in Nostradamus, and the piece of poetic padding at the end of my line 3 merely reflects it. Meanwhile, on arriving, Columbus had discovered that the entire garrison that he had left at Navidad on Hispaniola at the end of his first expedition had been massacred during his absence. In revenge for their deaths, two of his subordinates, Alonso de Ojeda and Pedro Margarit, then attacked them and took many slaves, apparently with Columbus's connivance. Nevertheless, he remained convinced that he had discovered China, and made his companions sign a declaration to that effect. It was only later that the realisation dawned on others that the orient lay much further on, beyond yet another ocean.





[20]
Original 1555 text
Aux champs de Mede, d’Arabe & d’Armenie,
Deux grands copies trois foys s’assembleront:
Pres du rivage d’Araxes la mesnie,
Du grand Solman en terre tomberont.
English translation
On Median, Arab and Armenian plains,
Shall two great hosts three times together clash:
Near to Araxes’ banks the mighty thanes
Of Soliman down to the ground shall crash.
Source:
The three famous battles between the Romans and Parthians of 53 BC, 36 BC and AD – the last of them won by the Romans – taken as omens of a coming defeat of Suleiman the Magnificent on the borders of Iran and/or Armenia, under the terms of the future re-invasion of the Middle East by Western Christian forces anticipated by the Mirabilis liber. Unfortunately, the prediction proved incorrect.




[21]
Original September 1557 text
Par terre Attique chef de la sapience,
Qui de present est la rose du monde:
Pont ruyné & sa grand preeminence,
Sera subditte & naufragé des undes.
English translation
That Attic land, foremost in wisdom’s lore,
The compass rose of this our present world,
The sea shall ruin, tumbled its fame of yore,
By waves sucked down and to destruction hurled.
Source:
One of the founding myths of ancient Greece, as recorded by Apollodorus (3.14.1), in which, following Athena’s victory over Poseidon for tutelage of Athens, she ‘called the city Athens after herself, and Poseidon in hot anger flooded the Thracian plain and laid Attica under the sea.’ This appears to be assimilated to the Mirabilis Liber’s forecast of worldwide floods in the run-up to the end of the world: see I.69.





[22]
Original 1555 text
Le grand mené captif d’estrange terre,
D’or enchainé au roy CHYREN offert,
Qui dans Ausonne, Millan perdra la guerre,
Et tout son ost mis à feu & à fer.
English translation
The noble lord’s dragged captive from abroad
Before King Henry chained with gold embossed,
Italy’s war, Milan’s great battle lost,
And all his host put to the flames and sword.
Source:
Book VII of Commynes’ Mémoires, describing the transfer in 1495 by Pope Alexander Borgia VI to Charles VIII of France of Prince Zimzim, the brother of the Turkish Sultan Bajazet, just before Charles had to retreat from Naples to Lombardy, finally losing his current Italian war – assimilated to the standard Roman triumph-ritual for victorious returning generals that involved parading their prisoners through the city in chains; and applied (apparently in reverse) to the Mirabilis liber’s anticipated final defeat by Christendom of its future Middle Eastern invaders, attributed successively by Nostradamus and his various successors first to Henri II, then to Henri IV and finally to some future ‘Henri V’: see I.4, I.55, I.92.




[23]
Original 1555 text
Du grand Prophete les letres seront prinses
Entre les mains du tyrant deviendront:
Frauder son roy seront ses entreprinses,
Mais ses rapines bien tost le troubleront.
English translation
The mighty prophet’s letter's interception
Shall put it in the tyrant’s hands instead.
His aim shall be his monarch’s rank deception,
But soon his graft shall bring him mighty dread.
Source:
The downfall of the powerful tyrant Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan, who in 1493, having inveigled the 22-year-old Charles VIII of France into invading Italy, signed a secret agreement with him to that effect – only to betray him two years later by rallying the forces of Austria, Venice and the Pope to expel him again. The scheming Sforza was now in a strong enough position to force a reconciliation with the weak-minded French king, but his treachery caught up with him in 1498, shortly after he had intercepted a letter to Charles from the religious firebrand and prophet Savonarola (a notable Italian figure quoted frequently by Nostradamus in his Preface, and at length in the Mirabilis Liber) appealing for help against Pope Alexander VI, who had excommunicated him after his violent criticism of the religious status quo – and to whom Sforza duly betrayed the letter. For it was in this self-same year that Charles died and his successor Louis XII (king of France during Nostradamus's childhood) finally conquered Milan and freed its oppressed people. After attempting to retake the city in 1500, Sforza was captured and spent the rest of his life imprisoned in France. Compare II.39.




[24]
Original 1555 text
Un an devant le conflit Italique,
Germain, Gaulois, Hespagnols pour le fort:
Cherra l’escolle maison de republique,
Ou, hors mis peu, seront suffoqués morrs.
English translation
A year before France, Germany and Spain
Shall hazard war in Italy for gain,
Shall fall that whorehouse that’s the city-state,
Then near all stifled be and suffocate.
Source:
The Medicis’ summary expulsion from Florence in 1494 with the aid of French forces – albeit resulting in the city’s loss of political autonomy – following the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Lorenzo de’ Medici) in 1492. This led to the repression in the name of religion of all that city’s resplendent Renaissance arts (which Lorenzo had been foremost in encouraging) by the rabid reformer and Dominican preacher Savonarola, who actually took over power and instigated the notorious ‘bonfire of the vanities’, destroying almost anything of value that he could get his hands on. The opportunist 1494 invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France (see II.36), opposed by an alliance of German and Spanish forces, marked the beginning of the Italian Wars that would still be tearing southern Europe apart during Nostradamus’s lifetime. Meanwhile the printer’s assistant seems to have had difficulty in reading some of the latter’s writing in this verse, and possibly didn’t know the Latin words Fors (confirmed by its rhyming-word in line 4) or scortum at all: the evidently scandalised Nostradamus’s obscuring of his text with Latin terms may simply have been precautionary, given that Lorenzo was the great-grandfather of the current French Queen, Catherine de Médicis. It would seem that he was keener on classical literature than on Renaissance art and princely hedonism!





[25]
Original 1555 text
Un peu apres non point longue intervalle.
Par mer & terre sera fait grand tumulte,
Beaucoup plus grande sera pugne navale,
Feus, animaux, qui plus feront d’insulte.
English translation
Shortly thereafter – no great time, in fact –
By land and sea great tumult there shall be:
Much greater shall the conflict be at sea:
Violent fires thrown in against th’ attacked.
Source:
The largely naval war of 1499 to 1503 between Venice and the Ottoman Turks (including some French involvement) that followed shortly after the events of II.39 above, and during the course of which the Turks conquered Montenegro and overran various strategic centres including Lepanto (on the gulf of Corinth) and Navarino (in the south-western Peloponnese). Nostradamus is evidently drawn particularly to the dramatic incident in which, in a battle off Navarino in 1499, the leading Ottoman captain Borrak, grappled by at least two Venetian vessels at once, set fire to all three ships in a suicidal act of sheer desperation, to the horror of the entire Venetian fleet. The whole situation is presumably assimilated to the future Muslim sea-borne invasion of Europe expected by the Mirabilis Liber: see I.9, I.75, II.24 . . .





[26]
Original September 1557 text
Le second chef du regne Dannemarc,
Par ceulx de Frise & l’isle Britannique,
Fera despendre plus de cent mille marc,
Vain exploicter voyage en Italique.
English translation
The second chief who Denmark’s realm has graced
For Frisians and Britain’s isle-domain
More than a hundred thousand marks shall waste
And use a trip to Italy in vain.
Source:
Presumably the 11th-century Gesta Cnutonis Regis, part of the Annales Bertiani, or Annals of St Bertin. This describes the pilgrimage of the lavishly generous King Canute (Knut II of Denmark) to Rome in 1027, timed to coincide with the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II, from whom he secured large reductions in tolls for English and Danish traders. For more on Canute, see IV.89.




[27]
Original 1555 text
Coq, chiens & chats de sang seront repeus,
Et de la plaie du tyrant trouvé mort,
Au lict d’uun autre jambes & bras rompus,
Qui n’avoit peur mourir de cruel mort.
English translation
Cocks, dogs and cats on blood and wounds shall feast
Of those who through the tyrant’s stroke are dead:
Arms and legs broken, in another’s bed
He who ne’er feared death’s cruel bite in the least.
Source:
Francesco Matarazzo’s Chronicles of the City of Perugia 1492 - 1503, describing (with a piece of characteristic word-play on the idea of ‘biting’) the fierce power struggle in the city of Perugia in 1495 between the Oddi and the reigning tyrants, the Baglioni (compare VIII.47). In the wake of one particular attempt to break into what had become the Baglione stronghold, ‘the dogs lapped up the blood of many Christians, and a tame bear tucked into the flesh of the dead, too’ (a gruesome detail which Nostradamus, clearly impressed, has evidently seen fit freely to exaggerate!). One young Baglione hero called Semonetto (though bareheaded, in his shirtsleeves and only 18 or 19 years old) fought particularly fearlessly to repel the enemy, even overcoming a mighty man of war from Fabriano, whom ‘he maimed in the hand and leg’, while himself sustaining no less than 22 wounds and giving himself up for dead. However, he eventually managed to make it to his brother’s house ‘and there laid himself down to rest, for by the grace of God not one of his many wounds proved fatal’. One suspects some slight confusion on Nostradamus’s part, though, as to exactly what happened to whom: his reading of Latin was sometimes notably vague.




[28]
Original 1555 text
Avant qu’avienne le changement d’empire,
Il aviendra un cas bien merveilleux,
Le champ mué, le pilier de porphyre,
Mis, translaté sus le rochier noilleux.
English translation
Before the Empire shall transferrèd be
A mighty miracle shall happen and,
The fight transformed, the shaft of porphyry
On Saxa Rubra shall in symbol stand.
Source:
Accounts of the life of the Emperor Constantine the Great by classical authors such as Socrates Scholasticus, or Eusebius in his celebrated ‘Ecclesiastical History’ (republished in French in the 1530s), and in particular of his reported miraculous vision of a heavenly cross inscribed with the words ‘By this conquer’ just before the battle of Saxa Rubra just outside Rome in AD 312. As a result of winning this vital battle against his rival Maxentius, also known as the battle of the Milvian Bridge, he adopted Christianity and went on to become Emperor. In consequence, the battle is widely regarded as one of the great turning-points in Christian history. Later, in 330, Constantine moved the Roman capital eastwards to Byzantium (which he had already renamed ‘Constantinople’ in AD 324) and erected a famous porphyry column to himself in the marketplace there. Saxa Rubra (today Grotta Rossa) means ‘red rocks’: Nostradamus, in typical style, and ever keen to create a mystery, has playfully translated the separate elements of the name into French (compare la grand cite neufve for ‘Naples/Neapolis’ at VI.97), while substituting rouilleux (‘rust-coloured’) for the more obvious rouge for purposes of rhyme and scansion.





[29]
Original 1555 text
Secteur de sectes grand preme au delateur:
Beste en theatre, dressé le jeu scenique:
Du faict antique ennobli l’inventeur,
Par sectes monde confus & scismatique.
English translation
The sect-dissecter spies shall full reward,
With beast and games the stage set up again.
The antic show’s discov’rer made a lord,
The world by sects confused and split in twain.
Source:
Events such as that reported by the contemporary Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris: ‘On the Saturday following (4th June 1530) it was also promulgated that anybody who knew of any secret Lutherans should come and reveal them to the Court of Parliament, and they would be given twenty gold crowns’,9 combined with the ennoblement by King Henri II of the poet Étienne Jodelle in 1553 following a performance of his ground-breaking classical verse-tragedy Cléopâtre captive and the subsequent ritual sacrifice by himself and his friends of a goat in celebration, after the proper pagan manner.





[30]
Original 1555 text
Bien defendu le faict par excelence,
Garde toy Tours de ta proche ruine.
Londres & Nantes par Reims fera defense
Ne passés outre au temps de la bruine.
English translation
Your strong defences being your greatest might,
Take guard, Tours, ’gainst your imminent demise!
London and Nantes to Reims shall stake their right.
No further go when mist about you lies!
Source:
One of the numerous editions of Froissart’s celebrated Chroniques, detailing events during the Hundred Years’ War, and in particular those surrounding the decisive Battle of Poitiers in 1356. In 1355 the English Parliament had agreed to finance a combined campaign against France, under which it was agreed that Edward the Black Prince would advance northward towards the Loire from the English territories in the south-west, his younger brother John of Gaunt (Duke of Lancaster) would strike in from Brittany, and Edward III would eventually make a push towards Reims in the hope of being crowned King of France there. The Black Prince duly ransacked much of western France and conquered a number of towns in Touraine, but was unable to take the city of Tours (Froissart: Chron. xii, 205), because of determined resistance and torrential rain, which turned the low lying ground south of the town into an impassable swamp. Retreating, he was then trapped by a vastly superior French army near Poitiers under King Jean II. In the event, though, the French were utterly defeated, and King Jean was captured and sent to England. The last line may refer to the Black Prince’s use of a smoke-screen to cover the movements of his archers prior to the French cavalry’s final, fatal charge.





[31]
Original text of 1568 edition
Pol mensolee mourra trois lieuës du rosne,
Fuis les deux [/] prochains tarasc destrois:
Car Mars fera le plus horrible trosne,
De coq & d’aigle de France freres trois.
English translation
At St-Paul-de-Mausole, three leagues from Rhône,
He’ll die, both fleeing near Tarascon’s strait,
For Mars shall sit upon his awful throne
Through Eagle, Cock: on France three brothers wait.
Source:
A so-far unidentified local incident at the height of the contemporary wars between France and the Holy Roman Empire, using the animal symbolism of the Mirabilis Liber’s Prophecy of St Brigid of Sweden. This would probably date it to around 1557, the date of the national disaster of the battle of St-Quentin. The three brothers are evidently the powerful Colignys – Gaspard (Seigneur de Châtillon and Admiral of France), François (Marquis d’Andelot) and Odet (Count-Bishop of Beauvais and Cardinal de Châtillon) – all of them notable Protestants (in Gaspard’s case, from around 1557) and members of the King’s Council, and all of whom, at the peak of their power during the late 1550s (when the verse was written), were to be squeezed out of it by the Catholic Guises on the death of King Henri II in 1559. The Rhône at Tarascon was at the time – and to an extent still is – divided into relatively narrow channels, or ‘straits’, by midstream islands, on one of which the Roman fort of Tarascon was originally founded.




[32]
Original 1555 text
Le vieux monarque deschassé de son regne
Aux Orients son secours ira querre:
Pour peur des croix pliera son enseigne:
En Mitilene ira pour port et terre.
English translation
The aged monarch hounded out from power
Shall from the Orient seek a helping hand.
Fearing crusaders, he his flag shall lower,
At Mitilini seek a port and land.
Source:
A so-far unidentified account of the deposition of the Byzantine emperor John V Palaeologus and his son and co-emperor Manuel II in 1376, and of their regaining of the throne three years later with the assistance of the Turks. This was given in exchange for recognition of their suzerainty following the breaking of an earlier promise by the Pope of help against them – itself made in exchange for John’s conversion to Catholicism in 1369. In spite of this Turkish support, however, his co-emperor Manuel II still had to flee to Lesbos in 1387 as a result of the growing Turkish threat in Thessaloniki. Possibly this typically ‘Byzantine’ series of events is assimilated to the Mirabilis Liber’s predictions of a future Muslim invasion of Europe: see I.9.





[33]
Original 1555 text
Le noir farouche quand aura essayé
Sa main sanguine par feu, fer, arcs tendus:
Trestout le peuple sera tant effraie,
Voyr les plus grads par col & pieds pendus.
English translation
Once the fierce Black his bloody hand has tried
And everyone to fire, sword, bow has put,
The common folk shall soon be terrified
To see their noblest hanged by neck and foot.
Source:
Almost certainly Froissart’s Chroniques, detailing the events of the Hundred Years’ War, and notably the Black Prince’s bloody campaign of burning and looting across western France leading to the
Battle of Poitiers of 1356, which proved so disastrous for the French (Luce, I.147-181). One of its major consequences was the so-called Jacquerie of 1558, a major peasant rebellion in northern France that had a leaderless but growing mob ransacking the castles of the lords and gentry, who were blamed for the disaster and its consequences and duly put to death in the most grisly of ways (Luce, I.182-184: ‘These wicked people, without a leader and without ordinary weapons, plundered and burned every house they came to, like mad dogs, murdering every gentleman and raping every lady they could find, showing no mercy anywhere. Never was such cruelty shown in Christendom, or by Saracens either.’). There was an outbreak of general terror (‘Meanwhile all the knights fled, with their wives and children and squires, sometimes to a distance of fifty miles, where they thought they would be safe... Every knight and squire who could do so fled with his lady...’), and it took a group of nobles from further afield finally to put down the revolt, hanging many of those involved (‘a number of gentlemen soon came from those parts and began to kill and destroy the brigands, whenever they found them, and to hang up their bodies all together on the nearest trees’). In not untypical fashion, though, Nostradamus seems to be applying Froissart’s half-remembered mention of hanging to the lords and gentry, rather than to the mob. The whole may possibly be assimilated to the Mirabilis Liber’s grim prediction of the invasion and occupation of France by Islamic invaders: see I.9, I.75, II.24. [Translated extracts are from Jolliffe: Froissart’s Chronicles, Penguin, 2001]





[34]
Original text of 1568 edition
Lac Trasmenien portera tesmoignage,
Des conjurez sarez dedans Perouse,
Un despolle contrefera le sage,
Tuant Tedesq de sterne & minuse.
English translation
Lake Trasimeno shall a witness be
To th’ plotters in Perugia shut and barred.
One robbed shall act most inadvisedly,
Killing a German, floored and cut apart.
Source:
Apparently Francesco Matarazzo’s Chronicles of the City of Perugia 1492 - 1503, recounting how, after the murder of a German student in 1487, violent clan wars broke out in Perugia between the Baglioni and the Oddi (see II.42), rather after the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ model. Eventually the Oddi were forced out, the city became a beleaguered fortress under the absolute despotic control of the Baglioni, and 130 conspirators who had managed to infiltrate it were strung up in the town square. In line 1 Nostradamus seems to be referring back to the fact that the nearby Lake Trasimeno had witnessed a similar massacre in 217 BC, when the great Carthaginian general Hannibal had famously trapped a Roman army under Gaius Flaminius and totally annihilated it.




[35]
Original 1555 text
Devant le peuple sang sera respandu
Que du haut ciel ne viendra eslogner:
Mais d’un long temps ne sera entendu
L’esprit d’un seul le viendra tesmoigner.
English translation
Before the people shall be shed the blood,
Nor shall the blame too far from heaven’s throne sit.
Long shall it be by no-one understood:
The mind of one alone shall witness it.
Source:
The De pactiana coniuratione commentarium by Angelo Poliziano, first published in Basel in 1553, describing the murder of the papally-connected Giuliano de’ Medici on April 26 1478 during Easter Mass at the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, and the wounding of his brother Lorenzo, who escaped with Poliziano’s help. The attack had been instigated by Pope Sixtus IV, his nephew Gerolamo Riario, Archbishop Salviati, and members of the Pazzi family, a wealthy Florentine family who rivalled the Medici. For many years the involvement of the then papacy in the conspiracy was not widely known, since Poliziano’s eyewitness account implicating Pope Sixtus IV was conspicuously omitted from his Omnia opera, published at Venice in 1498.





[36]
Original 1555 text
La republicque de la grande cité
A grand rigeur ne voudra consentir:
Roy sortir hors par trompete cité
L’eschele au mur, la cité repentir.
English translation
The rulers of the mighty city shall
Most stubbornly to give it up refuse.
To quit it shall the king the trumpet call:
The wall once scaled, the town shall change its views.
Source:
The firebrand monk Savonarola’s Compendium Revelationum, as reproduced in the Mirabilis Liber and extensively quoted by Nostradamus in his Preface, recounting the story of King Charles VIII of France’s attempted capture of Florence during his Italian campaign of 1494. This was vigorously resisted at the urging of Savonarola. As a result, the ruling Medici were expelled and Savonarola himself placed in a position of power. Piero Capponi, the new ruler, refused to accept any terms that Charles had negotiated with the Medici. ‘Then we shall sound our trumpets,’ said the king, to which Capponi replied, ‘And we shall toll our bells’ and tore up the king’s ultimatum in his face. Later, in March 1495, Savonarola had a vision of being transported to the gates of paradise, whose walls were surmounted by banners inscribed with the penitential prayers of Florence – a vision in which he mounted a ladder to the celestial throne. It was after this and Charles’s final departure from Italy that Savonarola finally gained personal control of the city at the head of a theocratic party that he dubbed ‘The Weepers’.





[37]
Original 1555 text
Quand le plus grand emportera le pris
De Nuremberg d’Auspurg, & ceux de Basle
Par Aggripine chef Francqfort repris
Transverseront par Flamans jusques en Gale.
English translation
When he who’s greatest shall the victory gain
O’er Nürnberg, over Augsburg, Basle and all,
Shall Frankfurt through Cologne’s lord be re ta’en:
Via Flemish lands they’ll stretch as far as Gaul.
Source:
The election at Frankfurt of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, in preference to France’s Francois I, as a result of which the Empire would now stretch right across the Low Countries as far as Artois in France. In 1547 Charles would finally secure a permanent majority for the Hapsburgs among the Catholic Electors by restoring a Catholic bishop in Cologne after a brief Protestant interlude.




[38]
Original September 1557 text
Du pont Euxine, & la grand Tartarie,
Un roy sera qui viendra voir la Gaule:
Transpercera Alane & l’Armenie,
Et dans Bisance lairra sanglante Gaule.
English translation
From Black Sea and from Tartary the Great
A king there’ll be who to see France shall come,
Lancing Alania and Armenia -- yet
His bloody rod shall spare Byzantium.
Source:
Numerous ancient accounts of the campaigns of Attila the Hun (known as ‘The Scourge of God’) ranging from Priscus’s History, via Cassiodorus’s Historia ecclesiastica tripartita and Jornandes’ (or Jordanis’) De Reb. Geticis (or De Origine Actibusque Getarum), to Gregory of Tours’ 6th-century Historia Francorum, with specific reference to Attila’s brutal invasion of Gaul in AD 451. A Latin edition of Cassiodorus in particular (the basic account) had been published by Johannes Froben of Basel in 1523, and republished in 1528, 1535, 1539 and 1544, as had the Greek original by Robert Estienne of Paris in 1544. In Gregory’s words, ‘And Attila king of the Huns went on from Metz and after he had crushed many Gaulish cities he attacked Orléans and tried to take it by dint of the mighty hammering of battering rams... Meanwhile, with the walls already shaking from the battering of the rams and about to fall, lo, Aetius arrived, and Theodorus, king of the Goths and his son Thorismodus rushed to the city with their armies, drove the enemy away and... put Attila to flight.’ Attila was then defeated at the epic Battle of the Catalaunian Plains and temporarily withdrew to Hungary. While still in the east, meanwhile, he had already been expensively bought off by the authorities at Constantinople, whose walls his archers had been in no position to break down anyway. The whole is evidently projected by Nostradamus into the future as a presage of the coming of the future Antichrist, in line with the Mirabilis Liber’s grim prediction of a Muslim invasion of Europe, in this case from Attila’s heartlands near the Caspian Sea: compare I.9, I.75, II.24. See also the verse’s ‘twin’ at II.29.




[39]
Original text of 1568 edition
Regne en querelle aux freres divisé,
Prendre les armes & le nom Britannique
Tiltre Anglican sera tard advisé,
Surprins de nuict [/] mener à l’air Gallique.
English translation
The realm the brothers shall at odds divide
The arms and name of Britain for to wrench:
The English kingly rank shall, late espied,
By night surprise him, led to a song in French.
Source:
The 13th century Récits d'un ménestrel de Reims, an apocryphal romance telling how the French minstrel Blondel de Nesle allegedly discovered and so brought about the release of his friend King Richard I of England from imprisonment in a variety of castles (1192-94) by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, after he had been captured while trying to make his way home across Europe in disguise in the wake of the failure of the Third Crusade to recapture Jerusalem from the Turks. The story tells how Blondel wandered from castle to European castle in search of his lord, finally discovering him when the latter spotted him from his prison and, through an archer’s slot, sang aloud the first verse of a ballad (possibly L’amours dont sui espris – compare Surprins in line 4 above?) that the two of them had privately composed together. Ransomed at huge expense and restored to his throne (to the discomfiture of his brother John, who had been plotting against him in his absence), the French-speaking Richard was duly crowned a second time before returning to France, where he spent the remaining five years of his reign before John finally succeeded him. See VI.14, X.86.




[40]
Original 1555 text
Les exiles [/] deportés dans les isles
Au changement d’ung plus cruel monarque,
Seront meurtrys: & mis deux des scintilles
Qui de parler ne seront estés parques.
English translation
The banished exiles to the isles conveyed
When for the worse shall change a crueller king
Shall murdered be, and saintly torches made
Of those who’ll not curb what they say or sing.
Source:
Books II, IV and V of Victor Vitensis’s Historia Persecutionis Provinciae Africanae (5th century) and/or book I of Procopius’s De bello Vandalico (6th century), the latter published by Johannes Herwagen of Basel in 1531, describing the persecution by the North African Arian Vandals of the local Roman Catholics during the latter, particularly cruel years of King Huneric of Carthage (AD 477-484). As recalled by Edward Gibbon in his Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, the local bishops were first banished to Corsica and then rebanished to Sardinia, where ‘these unhappy exiles... were condemned to share the distress of a savage life.’ Meanwhile, in the areas settled by the Vandals, ‘the exercise of the Catholic worship was... strictly prohibited; and severe penalties were denounced against the guilt both of the missionary and the proselyte... Respectable citizens, noble matrons, and consecrated virgins, were stripped naked, and raised in the air by pulleys, with a weight suspended at their feet. In this painful attitude their naked bodies were torn with scourges, or burnt in the most tender parts with red-hot plates of iron. The amputation of the ears, the nose, the tongue, and the right hand, was inflicted by the Arians; and although the precise number cannot be defined, it is evident that many persons, among whom a bishop and a proconsul may be named, were entitled to the crown of martyrdom.’ These persecutions by North Africans of Roman Catholics are then evidently assimilated by Nostradamus to the corresponding persecutions predicted by the Mirabilis Liber for an indeterminate and threatening future. Compare I.9, I.15.





[41]
Original 1555 text
La republique miserable infelice
Sera vastée du nouveau magistrat:
Leur grand amas de l’exil malefice
Fera Sueve ravir leur grand contract.
English translation
That miserable and unhappy state
Shall be laid waste by their new magistrate:
The bulk shall from that exiled evil-doer
Their big-time contract make the Swiss allure.
Source:
The formal enactment by the city council of Geneva of Jean Calvin's Ecclesiastical Ordinances for governing the entire city on Protestant religious lines, after he had been formally invited back to the city in 1541 following a three-year exile in Strasbourg. The piously Catholic Nostradamus naturally disapproves mightily.




[42]
Original 1555 text
La grande bande & secte crucigere
Se dressera en Mesopotamie:
Du proche fleuve compaignie legiere,
Que telle loy tiendra pour ennemie.
English translation
A mighty Christian sect, a major band,
Within Mesopotamia shall stand:
A lighter force beyond the flood nearby
Such tenets shall as hostile ones decry.
Source:
Possibly William of Tyre’s Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, later translated as the 12th-13th century Chronique d’outremer, or Livre d’Erades or Lime du conquest, describing the foundation of the four Middle Eastern Crusader States (Edessa, Tripoli, Jerusalem and Antioch) after the success of the First Crusade and capture of Jerusalem in July 1099. Of the four, Edessa – by far the largest – had been extended southeastwards into Mesopotamia by 1118. In 1128 Zengi, the Atabeg of Mosul, took the town of Aleppo, on the other side of the Euphrates, and established it as a major centre for Islamic resistance that was to become a major threat to the Crusader states in the region.



[43]
Original 1555 text
La grand montaigne ronde de sept estades,
Apres paix, guerre, faim, inundation,
Roulera loing abysmant grands contrades,
Mesmes antiques, & grand fondation.
English translation
The mighty mount seven stadia in girth --
Once peace, war, famine, flood have all abounded --
Shall roll and crush great kingdoms of the earth,
However far, or old, or firmly founded.
Source: 1 version
The famous prophetic dream of Nebuchadnezzar, as described in the second chapter of the Book of Daniel, in which ‘a stone... cut out of a mountain without hands’ destroys a mighty statue of gold, silver, bronze, iron and clay that Daniel interprets as standing for four successive ancient world empires (conventionally associated with Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome). The stone grows into ‘a great mountain filling the whole earth’ and stands for the expected Kingdom of God, which (following the tribulations expected by the Mirabilis Liber to presage the End of the World, as referred to in line 2) ‘shall shatter and make an end of all these kingdoms, while it shall itself endure for ever.’ The mountain is evidently here associated with King David’s Mount Zion (the site of ancient Jerusalem) – long used by the Bible to represent the Kingdom itself – which indeed measured around a mile in circumference, though the actual source of Nostradamus’s ‘seven stadia’ (some 1400 yards) appears to have been Josephus’s description of King Herod’s fortress of Masada.





[44]
Original 1555 text
Le tyran Siene occupera Savone:
Le fort gaigné tiendra classe marine:
Les deux armées par la marque d’Ancone
Par effraieur le chef s’en examine.
English translation
From Genoa shall the tyrant take Savona:
The fortress gained, he shall a fleet hold back.
Two hosts shall pass the Marches of Ancona:
Fearful, the chiefs their consciences shall rack.
Source:
Livy’s History of Rome (xxviii, 46), describing the Carthaginian invasion of northern Italy in 205 BC: ‘During the course of that summer Mago, son of Hamilcar… set sail for Italy with some thirty beaked warships and a large number of transports carrying 12,000 infantry and some 2,000 cavalry and, with the coast unguarded, succeeded in capturing Genoa by surprise… The Carthaginian deposited his booty in the Alpine town of Savona, left ten longships to guard it, and dispatched the rest to Carthage to patrol the coast… He then… started to attack the Montani. His strength grew daily, and the Gauls flocked to the renown of his name from every side. Learning of this via a dispatch from Spurius Lucretius, the Senate became acutely anxious lest the rejoicing of two years earlier over the destruction of Hasdrubal and his army should prove vain… They therefore ordered the proconsul Marcus Livius to transfer his force of slave volunteers from Etruria to Rimini, and the praetor Servilius was instructed to order the two Urban legions forth from the city if he thought it in the interests of the state, under whomever he should assign to the command. Marcus Valerius Laevinus led them to Arezzo.’ The main Via Flaminia from Rome to Rimini did indeed skirt the edge of the Marches of Ancona. Nostradamus is, as ever, taking the ancient Carthaginian invasions of Italy as precursors of the Mirabilis Liber’s expected future invasion of Europe by Muslims from North Africa.





[45]
Original 1555 text
D’un nom farouche tel proferé sera,
Que les troys seurs auront fato le nom:
Puis grand peuple par langue & faict duira
Plus que nul autre aura bruit & renom.
English translation
By name right fierce a man shall be decreed
Whose name is fated by those Sisters Three.
Then a great host by word and deed he’ll lead:
More than all others famed, renowned he’ll be.
Source:
A thirteenth-century poem in praise of the French King Philip Augustus entitled The Philippiad by the poet and chronicler Guillaume Le Breton, in which the destiny of Philip’s contemporary, King Richard Coeur de Lion of England, is woven, and his death before the castle of Châlus decided, by the three Fates of ancient Greek mythology – here presented as though it all took place long before his magnificent leadership of the international (though failed) Third Crusade of 1190 and the world-wide renown that it brought him.




[46]
Original 1555 text
Entre deux mers dressera promontoire
Que puis mourra par le mords du cheval:
Le sien Neptune pliera voyle noire,
Par Calpre & classe aupres de Rocheval.
English translation
In from the sea, he’ll mount a great attack,
Such that one then by horse’s bit shall die:
His admiral shall furl his sail so black
Near Caspe, forces Roncevaux soon by.
Source:
The celebrated 11th-12th century Chanson de Roland, a stirring epic well known to (if not necessarily read by) every French school-child, then as now. This described how, after a desperate fight, the semi-mythical Frankish hero Roland, together with the rest of Charlemagne’s rearguard, were slain by Saracen forces in the pass of Roncevaux in AD 778 (though historically they were actually Basques) most of whom, under an Admiral called Baligant, had allegedly been summoned from Africa and had duly arrived under cover of darkness, sailing up the river Ebro via the ancient city of Caspe to Saragossa. In Charles Scott Moncrief’s 1919 translation:
Great are the hosts of that opposed race;
With speed they sail, they steer and navigate...
The pagan race would never rest, but come
Out of the sea, where the sweet waters run…
Upstream by Sebre [Ebro?] doth all their navy turn.
Lanterns they have, and carbuncles enough,
That all night long and very clearly burn.
Upon that day they come to Sarragus.
Nostradamus, probably working from memory (as was evidently his wont), seems to have assumed that the fleet was commanded by the Moorish king Marsile himself. Guenes, a Frankish emissary to the Moorish court, subsequently committed treachery and was condemned by his own side to be pulled to pieces by wild stallions dragged by four sergeants-at-arms. The whole is evidently assimilated to the Mirabilis Liber's familiar theme of a future major Muslim invasion of Europe: see I.9.




[47]
Original 1555 text
Par arcs feuz poix & par feuz repoussés:
Cris, hurlemens sur la minuit ouys.
Dedans sont mis par les ramparts cassés
Par cunicules les traditeurs fuis.
English translation
Repulsed by burning pitch, by fire and bow,
Of shouts and screams is heard the midnight sound.
Through broken walls within they’ll seek to go,
The traitors flee through tunnels underground.
Source:
A slightly misconstrued reading of the account in the 13th-century Historia Albigensis by Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay of the contemporary siege by Count Simon de Montfort of Termes in the year 1210, presumably assimilated to the Mirabilis Liber’s expectation of a future counter-invasion of Europe by Christian forces. The ‘Crusaders’ attacking the ‘heretics’ in the town were repeatedly driven back and their siege engines set on fire, until they raised a great shout when they discovered that the defenders were escaping by night. Vaux-de-Cernay’s account has evidently given Nostradamus the impression that they were doing so via the crusaders’ own saps, or tunnels: ‘One day, on the feast of St Cecilia, the Count had a trench carefully excavated and covered with hurdles to allow sappers to approach the wall and undermine it. The Count spent the whole day preparing the trench without breaking off to eat, and as night approached – it was the eve of the feast of St Clement – he returned to his tent. The enemy in Termes, with the intervention of Divine clemency and the help of the Blessed Clement, were seized with fear to the point of utter desperation. They at once ran out in an effort to escape. The men of our army saw what was happening, raised a great shout, and began to run hither and thither in order to capture the fugitives.’




[48]
Original 1555 text
D’un chef viellard naistra sens hebete,
Degenerant par savoir & par armes
Le chef de Françe par sa sœur redouté:
Champs divisés, concedés aux gendarmes.
English translation
Heir to an old chief, losing touch, weak-headed,
With competence and aptitude for war,
The chief from France, now by its sister dreaded,
Shall fields divide and to his troops hand o’er.
Source:
Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars and Divus Claudius, describing how the increasingly doddery Roman Emperor Claudius, born in the French city of Lyon – a man whom Suetonius describes as ‘dim witted’ and even his own mother despised as stupid – decided to boost his military reputation by invading France’s sister-country Britain in AD 43. He even commanded the invasion himself. Claudius was the son of Drusus, who according to Suetonius was suspected by many of being the illegitimate son of the long-lived emperor Augustus: and just as Augustus had remodelled the city of Arles for the 6th Legion, veterans of his Egyptian campaigns, and parcelled out the country between Arles and St-Rémy (Nostradamus’s birthplace) to his centurions in the form of plots known as ‘centuries’, so Claudius established a similar colony for his veterans in Britain at Colchester, then known as Camulodunum. Compare II.95 for a similar theme.




[49]
Original 1555 text
La gent estrange divisera butins,
Saturne en Mars son regard furieux:
Horrible strage aux Tosquans & Latins,
Grecs, qui seront à frapper curieux.
English translation
The alien race the booty out shall share:
At Mars shall Saturn glare with furious mien.
For Latins, Tuscans, fearsome massacre
Of Greeks who them to strike shall be so keen.
Source:
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (‘Pyrrhus’), describing the original ‘Pyrrhic victory’ of 279 BC in southern Italy. Called in by the inhabitants of the Greek colony of Tarentum to assist them against the encroaching Romans, King Pyrrhus of Epirus duly sailed to Italy from Greece and twice defeated them roundly. ‘He took over the Romans’ abandoned camp... laid waste the surrounding countryside, and advanced so far that he came to within some thirty-seven miles of Rome itself...’ However, his losses vastly exceeded those of the Romans, in quality if not in numbers, to the point where he is said to have remarked that another ‘victory’ like that would finish him. In the summer of 279 BC Saturn and Mars were, as the first line indicates, in opposition in the sky. Presumably the incident is intended to refer back to the Mirabilis Liber’s anticipated invasion of Italy by Muslim forces – given that, in Nostradamus’s day, Greece was under occupation by the Ottomans, who had, similarly, briefly occupied Otranto in southern Italy in 1480. See I.9, I.15, I.75.



[50]
Original 1555 text
La grand cité sera bien desolée
Des habitans un seul ny demeurra:
Mur, sexe, temple, & vierge violée,
Par fer, feu, peste, canon peuple mourra.
English translation
The mighty city shall be desolated,
Of its inhabitants not one remain.
Church walls and orders, virgins violated,
By sword, fire, plague and cannon people slain.
Source:
The Mirabilis liber’s gruesome description of the destruction of Rome and the persecution of the Church by the expected Arab invaders of Europe, assimilated to the savage sacking of Rome in 1527
by the Imperial forces (largely Protestant) of Charles V under the renegade former Constable of France Charles de Bourbon and the mercenary commander Georg von Frundsberg (see IX.26, X.20, X.27, X.65), which was far worse than the city’s previous sack during the barbarian invasions of the fifth century and thoroughly shocked the contemporary Catholic world. Following the breakdown of control after Bourbon’s death on the first day (May 6th), the city was wrecked, plundered and torched, those of its citizens who were not butchered or killed accidentally by the defending artillery were held to ransom, and church buildings were profaned, their treasures looted, their priests humiliated and tortured, their nuns raped. Even the Pope and his entourage had to flee to the safety of the Castel Sant’ Angelo, where they remained until December. And, to crown it all, all this was followed by an outbreak of the Plague.





[51]
Original September 1557 text
Un grand d’Auserre mourra bien miserable,
Chassé de ceulx qui soubz luy ont esté:
Serré de chaisnes, apres d’un rude cable,
En l’an que Mars, Venus, & Sol mis en esté
English translation
A noble from Auxerre a wretch shall die,
Hunted by those who were his underlings:
In rough chains, then crude cable, they’ll him tie,
The year when summer Mars, Sun, Venus brings.
Source:
A so-far-unidentified thirteenth-century account of the miserable death of Pierre II de Courtenay, Count of Auxerre, while on his way to claim the throne of Constantinople in 1217. Betrayed by a Greek army that was supposed to provide him and his French troops with safe passage overland to his dominion, he was instead led into a trap, taken prisoner by Theodore Angelus, Despot of Epirus, and eventually put to death, apparently in 1218 – a year when a conjunction of Mars, Venus and the Sun indeed occurred in the sign of Virgo from 17 to 28 August and when his son Robert de Courtenay succeeded him on the Byzantine throne.





[52]
Original 1555 text
Par la response de dame, roy troublé:
Ambadassadeurs mespriseront leur vie:
Le grand ses freres contrefera doublé
Par deus mourront, ire, haine, envie.
English translation
The Lady’s answer shall the monarch trouble:
The envoys in their hands shall take their life.
The lord shall counterfeit his brothers double,
And two shall die from anger, hatred, strife.
Source:
Probably the complicated story of the rejection in 1549 by Lady Mary Tudor (later Queen Mary of England) of her young Protestant half-brother King Edward VI’s attempts to force her to abjure Roman Catholicism, resulting in a bitter spat between him and her Catholic cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, that placed both Sir Richard Morison, the English ambassador (an outspoken evangelical) and his counterpart, the Imperial ambassador in London (who was ordered to threaten war), in distinctly invidious positions. In the same year, the Lord High Admiral, Thomas Seymour, after counterfeiting both his brother’s signature and the dry stamp signature of his nephew the King in a plot to kidnap him, was put to death – while his own brother Edward, until then Lord Protector, was arrested, to be himself executed on trumped up charges only two-and-a-half years later.




[53]
Original text of 1568 edition
Passer Guienne, Languedoc & le Rosne,
D’Agen tenens de Marmande & la Roole
D’ouvrir [par foy] par roy Phocen tiendra son trosne
Conflit aupres saint Pol de Manseole.
Engliash translation
They’ll pass Guyenne, the Languedoc, the Rhône,
Via Agen, Marmande and la Réole.
Border oped wide, Marseille shall have his throne:
Conflict there’ll be near St-Paul-de-Mausole.
Source:
In view of the local detail, almost certainly the Provençal chronicles of Nostradamus’s brother Jehan (whether or not in conjunction with Froissart’s Chroniques), recounting the campaigns of Bertrand du Guesclin, later Constable of France, in southern France during the Hundred Years’ War. In 1368, in the course of an attack on Jeanne I of Anjou (Queen of Naples and Sicily and ruler of Provence), he led a Gascon army from Guyenne into Languedoc, then crossed the Rhône and, entering Provence, laid siege to the frontier town of Tarascon (not far from St-Paul-de-Mausole – with its blessed rhyming-word! – and Nostradamus’s own birthplace), thanks to a treaty with Louis I of Anjou (heir to the throne of Naples, Count of Provence and thus, presumably, cognate with ‘Marseille’), who duly obtained the throne of Provence in 1382.





[54]
Original 1555 text
Le chef d’Ausonne aux Hespagnes ira
Par mer fera arrest dedans Marseille:
Avant sa mort un long temps languira:
Apres sa mort on verra grand merveille:
English translation
From Italy the lord to Spain shall sail
By sea: at Marseille he to rest shall come:
Before his death he’ll languish long in jail:
After his death a wonder seen by some.
Source:
Local knowledge of the life of St Louis of Toulouse, sometime heir to the thrones of Naples and Sicily, possibly gathered by Nostradamus while at Marseille. Sent to Aragon in 1288 at the age of 14 as a hostage for his defeated father, the young Louis languished in captivity for seven years, finally leaving as a Franciscan monk. Within a year, having renounced his claim to the throne, he was consecrated Bishop of Toulouse in recognition of his piety, but died the following year after contracting a fever. After his funeral he is alleged to have restored the life of a small child after intercession by her father. His remains were venerated in the Franciscan church at Marseille until 1423, and his rhythmical office was celebrated there from 1343 until 1568. (The rhyme-induced words ‘in jail’ are my own copyright.)





[55]
Original 1555 text
Ennosigée feu du centre de terre
Fera trembler au tour de cité neufve:
Deux grands rochiers long temps feront la guerre
Puis Arethusa rougira nouveau fleuve.
English translation
Earth-shaking fires from the world’s centre roar:
Around ‘New City’ is the earth a-quiver.
Two nobles long shall wage a fruitless war,
The nymph of springs pour forth a new, red river.
Source:
Presumably the Annales Cassini (the annals for the years 1000 to 1212 of the major Benedictine abbey and library of Monte Cassino, which had already served as a source for Dante’s Divina Commedia), describing the first known lava eruption in 1036 of Mount Vesuvius overlooking Naples (Greek Neapolis = ‘New City’), at a time when the Lombards of Capua and the Byzantine dukes of Naples were constantly at war over the city prior to the decisive intervention of the Normans. For 968, similarly, Leo Marsicanus had reported in the same annals that ‘Mount Vesuvius exploded into flames and sent out huge quantities of sticky, sulphurous matter that formed a river rushing down to the sea’. As with the ‘omens’ of 1554 (a two-headed kid, a two-headed infant and the celebrated Salon meteorite), Nostradamus is projecting the eruption into the future as an omen of an imminent civil war that will, like the volcano, produce a ‘red river’, but this time presumably of blood. Possibly, too, he is associating it with the Mirabilis liber’s prediction of: ‘ . . . battles, tribulations, bloodshed, earthquakes, cities in captivity’ (Prophecy of the Tiburtine Sibyl). In the absence of any known source-publication, this and other evident references to the Cassino annals (see II.16, VI.97) could add weight to the suggestion that Nostradamus, on his visit to Italy of 1547-9, ventured far to the south, at least partly in search of ancient records and archives – and especially, perhaps, of major events that had apparently been signalled by ‘omens’.





[56]
Original September 1557 text
Ttente de Londres secret conjureront,
Contre leur roy sur le pont l’entreprise:
Luy, satalites la mort degousteront,
Un Roy esleu blonde, natif de Frize.
English translation
Thirty from London secretly lay schemes
By sea to act against their king anointed.
He and his henchmen death shall taste, it seems:
A Frieslander, a blond king is appointed.
Source:
Presumably the 11th-century Gesta Cnutonis Regis, part of the Annales Bertiani, or Annals of St Bertin, describing the accession to the English throne of King Canute of Denmark in 1016, following the death of Edmund Ironside, many of whose nobles had already declared in favour of Canute at Southampton that year. See VI.41, where Canute is also associated with Frisia.





[57]
Original 1555 text
Au port Selin le tyran mis à mort
La liberté non pourtant recouvrée:
Le nouveau Mars par vindicte & remort:
Dame par force de frayeur honorée.
English translation
At Port Selinus, though the Tyrant's killed,
Freedom shall yet not be recoverèd:
The warlord new, though with old vengeance filled,
Shall ladies honour out of fear and dread.
Source:
Diodorus Siculus’s vast, classic history of the ancient world entitled Bibliotheca historica (III, xiii, 17) – presumably in Poggio’s Latin translation published in Paris in around 1515 – describing the Carthaginian invasion in 409 BC of the then major port-city of Selinus on the south-western coast of Sicily, which never fully recovered from the blow and nowadays lies deserted and ruined by earthquake, with its twin harbours buried under the silt and sand of centuries. As Diodorus reports, the 100,000-strong force of arch-enemies slaughtered over 16000 and enslaved over 5000: in fact ‘there were only 2600 inhabitants of Selinus who were fortunate enough to escape to Agrigento.’ Moreover, when the Agrigentans dispatched ambassadors to seek concessions from the Carthaginian leader Hannibal (not the later Hannibal the Great), ‘Hannibal replied that it was appropriate that the Selinans, not having been able to hang on to their liberty, should undergo servitude.’ However, the invaders famously ‘forbade the killing of the women who had taken refuge in the temples’, not for religious reasons but because ‘they feared that they might set fire to them in order to bury themselves under their ruins, given that they wanted to save the plunder for themselves from which they hoped to draw great riches.’ After Hermocrates (the expelled Greek tyrant of newly democratic Syracuse) had briefly rebuilt Selinus, he was killed and the city finally recognised as a Carthaginian possession, with all hope of regaining any similar democracy or freedom gone. As for Nostradamus’s highly selective version of all this, the tradition of producing one’s own digest of a text (presumably to show that one had fully mastered it and made it one’s own), rather than quoting its exact words (a procedure that seems to have been regarded as somewhat ‘infra dig’ at the time, even where the exigencies of putting it in verse didn’t actually forbid it), was a strong one in the sixteenth century, in the present case resulting in a curious inversion of the order of events.





[58]
Original September 1557 text
Cinq & quarante degrés ciel bruslera,
Feu approucher de la grand cité neufve,
Instant grand flamme esparse saultera,
Quant on voudra des Normans faire preuve :
English translation
Latitude forty-five, the sky shall burn:
To great ‘New City’ shall the fire draw nigh.
With vehemence the flames shall spread and churn
When with the Normans they conclusions try.
Source:
Presumably the Annales Cassini (the annals for the years 1000 to 1212 of the major Benedictine abbey and library of Monte Cassino, which had already served as a source for Dante’s Divina Commedia), given that the last line of the verse evidently refers back to the Norman capture of Naples (Greek Neapolis = ‘New City’) in 1139, the very year when the Annals also record an explosive eruption of nearby Vesuvius for 1-8 June (as do Falcone Beneventano, the Chronicle of the Monastery of Cava dei Tirreni and, John of Salisbury), when ashes covered Salerno, Benevento, Capua and Naples. True, Naples lies at 40o 50' North, rather than 45o 00' North. However, the first line could conceivably be intended to read Cinq- & quarante degrés (i.e. 'fif[ty minutes] and forty degrees), which would be correct. Meanwhile the intended future reference would be to the Mirabilis Liber’s promised Western counter-invasion against the Muslim occupiers of Europe (see I.55), and the ‘fire from the sky’ would be a new volcanic eruption that, in Nostradamus’s view, is destined to mark it (compare I.87).





[59]
Original text of 1568 edition
Le grand empire sera par Angleterre,
Le pempotam [/] des ans plus de trois cens:
Grandes copies passer par mer & terre,
Les Lusitains n’en seront pas contens.
English translation
For England the all-powerful shall be
More than three hundred years’ imperial sway.
Great armies shall set out by land and sea:
The Lusignans shall surely rue the day.
Source:
The acquisition of Aquitaine by Henry II of England on 18 May 1152, when he married Eleanor of Aquitaine, thus inheriting through her all the land between the Loire and the Pyrenees. The local Lusignan family, who had hitherto been powerful in the region, were so affronted by this that they even kidnapped Eleanor for a time in an attempt to win back some of the territory. However, this ‘empire’ came to an end on 20 July 1453, when John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, lost it all at the battle of Châtillon to the Bastard of Orleans, General Daunois. It had thus lasted for just 301 years. As for projecting all this into the future, Nostradamus may have assimilated it to the prophecies outlined in Richard Roussat’s Livre de l’estat et mutations des temps of 1549/50, under the terms of which the world had just entered (in 1533) the 354-year ‘Age of the Moon’. This was traditionally associated with the Roman Empire, while the eventual zodiacal ‘Air Triplicity’ (due after some 330 years of it) would see the coming of the Antichrist and the supremacy of the powers of the North. The proposed link with England would in this case arise from Roussat’s statement that ‘under this triplicity of Air, which causes
the Northerners to triumph, hold sway and be victorious, there flourished the Noble Knights of King Arthur of Britain, being of the number of the Round Table; and since this triplicity . . . also applies to the Prophets, Merlin was of their number, too . . .’ On this basis, then, what Nostradamus would have been projecting into the future, along lines already laid down by Roussat, was nothing less than a new British Camelot during the late nineteenth-century – a prospect that would hardly have appealed to Spain and Portugal (the Lusitans), who were the main imperial powers of Nostradamus’s day.
 

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