Chapter 3

Unfathomable Afflictions

There is one thing that Nostradamus has never provided: clarity. Whether first-time or repeat, readers rarely escape profound bewilderment. “I enjoy [the predictions] but I don’t understand them,” said Blaise Cendrars. Such feelings were already present during Michel de Nostredame’s lifetime. The man lived in an age of mystifying prophecies, allegorical engravings, and analogical means of reasoning. Contemporaries expected to encounter symbolic depictions of the world and to parse signs for intimations of cosmic mysteries. And yet Nostredame still stood out. The prevailing opinion was that he wrote in “veiled terms, enigmas, and a disguised language,” as one observer put it. His predictions seemed more cryptic than others, or else cryptic in ways and for reasons that others were not. This mix of density and opacity made all of the difference.¹

A lawyer from Avignon was so puzzled by one horoscope in 1562 that he requested clarification: “If you could translate your answer into a language that is—I won’t say utterly common, but at least a little clearer, perhaps I might understand something of what it says.” Around the same time, Lorenz Tubbe wrote Nostredame about the catastrophe that he had predicted for the French town of Bourges. “What is it about?” Good question. So are the follow-ups. Did Nostredame have to be so cryptic? And so dark, too, with his “tears & shrieks & moans, vociferations, fright”? What does this say about the lure of Nostradamus in the late Renaissance and afterward?²

Over time, these questions came increasingly to revolve around his Prophecies, which first came out in 1555 and allowed Nostredame to join a line of prophetic figures who had been expressing themselves through print since the late fifteenth century. The book was a collection of quatrains, grouped in sets of one hundred. Each set was called a centurie, a term that has sometimes been used as the book’s title (The Centuries). The first edition contained 353 quatrains and a preface to his oldest son César. Two years later, a second edition included seven centuries, two of them incomplete. In 1568, two years after Nostredame’s death, a final edition added three full centuries and an epistle to King Henri II. All three editions were published in Lyon, although by different publishers. This final total of 942 quatrains is odd. Why, after all, did the book not include a thousand?

Nostredame may have intended it as such, or perhaps not, perhaps he ran out of time. Quatrains may have gone astray in publishers’ workshops or—yet another possibility—he may have fit as many as he could in the sixteen-page sheets that publishers routinely used. It is not clear either why the last three centuries came out after his death. Some commentators believe that they had been part of a lost 1558 edition that bore the imprint of the eminent Jean de Tournes, publisher of Ovid and Dante and other illustrious authors. Others have suggested that the last three centuries and the epistle were composed by an unknown scribe after his death. It is true that some features, including the erratic use of commas and semicolons, change noticeably in the latter section of the book. But the rhythm, the tension, the tenor of the words are the same. And ultimately, conjectures about single or composite authorship will not take us very far. The key point is that most readers believed in his own time and later that Nostredame had penned the 942 quatrains.³

Nostredame was not the first to write centuries but by all appearances he was the only one to publish them alongside almanacs and prognostications. He thus provided predictions about the year or decade to come as well as long-term ones whose timing was vague. Whether in his horoscopes or his publications, Nostredame’s calculations and visions rarely yielded utmost precision. He generally spoke of favorable or unfavorable configurations. The Prophecies included few dates: 1580 (a very strange age), 1607 (Arabs seize a king), 1609 (a papal election), 1700 (attacks from the east), 1703 (realms changing), 1727 (the capture of a Persian monarch), 1792 (a new age), 1999 (a king descending from the sky), and 3797 (the end of the world).⁴

The quatrain that seemed to refer to 1727 (3.77) condenses Nostredame’s approach:

Nostredame continued to draw from astrology, linking future events to astral influences, inclinations of the sun, and conjunctions. But he now did so alongside prophecy. Astrologers provided interpretations of celestial signs according to a method. Prophets, in contrast, were elected by God to convey augurs to humanity. They typically proffered warnings or requested renewed devotion. Nostredame danced around his devotion to vatic arts. Many prophets and visionaries had come out of Provence during the late Middle Ages, men with names like Jean de Roquetaillade, but Nostredame did not position himself as their heir. Nor did he resemble familiar prophetic types: the lowly, unorthodox man, the pure figure who disregarded his body, or the divine envoy who interpreted Scripture to help a leader overcome adversity. Some prophets were educated scribes, not unlike Nostredame, but he renounced the prophet’s title, name, or power. The secrets of God the Creator, he explained, remain closed to mere human beings. “If I have made mention of the term prophet,” he wrote in his preface to the Prophecies, “far be it from me to arrogate a title this exalted, this sublime.” A prophet, he added, “is properly speaking someone who sees distant things with the natural knowledge possessed by all creatures.” And his Prophecies, he concluded, were written “in nebulous figures rather than palpably prophetic.”⁵

Still, the book’s title is not innocent. Nostredame combined facets of the Jewish prophet who brought together past, present, and future; the Christian prophet who could accomplish nothing without divine power; and the melancholy Aristotelian prophet who could connect with the soul of the world. He may also have seen himself as a modern-day oracle who reactivated classical traditions. He liked to depict himself alone in his study at night, his mind cleansed and peaceful, open to messages inscribed in stars and to intimate encounters with a divine voice. Guided by “natural instinct & accompanied by poetic furor,” overcome by prophetic inspiration, and dabbling in white magic (he wore laurel crowns and a sky-blue stone ring during these sessions), Nostredame composed what he called “nocturnal & prophetic calculations.”⁶

In quatrain 3.77, one of these calculations revolved around the king of Persia’s capture by Egyptians in 1727. (I have been unable to uncover any such event that year, though the Safavid ruler Tahmãsp II and the soldier of fortune Nadir Kuli did stop Afghan advances into Persia. Two years later, they pushed back the Ottomans as well). Nostredame often referred to such noteworthy but vaguely identified figures. Others include the king, the emperor, the Great Turk, the pope, the chief, the first personage, and the “ornament of his age.” This king’s capture is but one of the violent incidents depicted in the book, along with raids and expeditions, kidnappings and betrayals, and the battles and defeats mentioned in the fourth line. They are ubiquitous but seldom linked to specific events.⁷

As for the disgraced cross in the last line, it may well refer to Catholicism. While religion is a prevailing concern in the Prophecies, the book says little explicitly about Christian rites, mysteries, and the Holy Ghost—much less than other theological or prophetic works of that era, even if it refers more than once to the “divine word” and the “corporal substance of the spirit” (quatrains 3.2 and 8.99). This was probably a reference to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation of Christ’s blood and body into the Eucharist, which Catholics were reaffirming in the face of Protestant attacks. The Prophecies were written while Catholic prelates convened at the Council of Trent to denounce Protestant heresies, reaffirm the central Church doctrine, and issue reform decrees. Quatrain 8.99 might have referred to the council and transubstantiation: “They shall change the site of the Holy See / Where the corporal substance of the spirit / Shall be restored & received as the true seat.”⁸

Still, some contemporaries grew suspicious of Nostredame’s religious convictions. Had he not attended a medical school with a notorious Protestant bent? Had he not befriended the dubious Julius Scaliger? And did rumors not accuse him of mocking the cult of the Virgin Mary? Some commentators raised the question in his lifetime, and others have regularly returned to it ever since, claiming that Nostredame found in Protestantism a mystical piety and an intimate relationship with God that Catholicism could not offer. After all, he distinguished “Christians” (i.e., Protestants) from “papists” (Catholics), and used qui cum patre, a supplication to the Holy Spirit that took liberties with the mystery of the Trinity. He expressed sympathy for “brothers & sisters captured here & there,” a possible reference to oppressed Protestants. Founded as it is on a godly plan, divination also has affinities with Protestant doctrines of predestination. The case regarding Nostredame as a covert Protestant remains circumstantial, however, and it minimizes many things: Nostredame’s public denunciations of sects and religious schisms; his references to a great emperor and the pope (two mainstays of Catholic prophecy); and his private reverence for the Virgin Mother. It also implies that the Catholic authorities were dim or permissive, neither of which was true. The devout Catherine and other Catholic leaders did not question his faith. Ultimately, we are left with a man who wrote horoscopes and predictions for Catholics and Protestants alike, who did not side with any camp, and who may well have sought to go beyond such cleavages. He was never reclaimed by Protestants as one of their own. And he requested to be buried in a Catholic church “as a good, true and faithful Christian.”⁹

Nostredame knew how orthodoxy dealt with people who challenged its authority or creed. He understood the risks taken by alchemists who made mass irrelevant, by false prophets who dangled prospects of redemption outside the church’s purview, and by judicial astrologers who presented astral bodies as first causes that determined everything, supplanted God, and left no room for free will and personal responsibility. Nostredame accordingly vowed to subordinate judicial astrology to the Holy Scripture but without interpreting Scripture in the manner of biblical prophets. If he foresaw dangers looming for Rome (which he did in some quatrains), he did not frame them as punishment for the clergy’s corruption. He also denied venturing into a divine sphere in which human beings had no place, for this came close to demonology. He warned his son to avoid that “execrable magic that was long condemned by the Holy Scripture and the canons of the Church,” for this would cloud his mind and drive his soul to perdition. Regardless of his beliefs, Nostredame moreover cultivated relationships with bishops, vice-legates, and even the pope, this “Atlas of our Christian civilization,” to whom he dedicated at least one almanac. This is why he ran into few problems. Parisian magistrates inquired at one point about his activities, but they quickly dropped the matter. His Prophecies were neither burned in public squares nor included on the papal Index, the list of prohibited books that was issued by Paul IV in 1558.¹⁰

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To censor the Prophecies required that one understand them—and this was no easy task. Where, after all, was the third clime in the quatrain about the Persian king? Who would be defeated? Who would die? And could Nostredame not have been more precise regarding that cross?

Nostradamus’s literary world is governed by discontinuity. Lines often end with periods, raising questions about their relationship to what precedes and follows. Many quatrains switch direction after the second line. Transitions escape easy detection. It is never clear when successive clauses or lines build on one another. The same holds true of successive quatrains in the Prophecies. Two or three in a row sometimes touch on similar themes, but most of them stand alone. There is no linear progression, no single narrative arc with finely sketched characters and a resolution. Nostredame’s fragments and abrupt changes of course broke with the active verbs and declarative sentences of late medieval prophecy. They also shared little with the simple, transparent style that the Renaissance deemed appropriate for lowly topics. This was a world apart.¹¹

Once again, it comes down to the words. French dominates, but one also finds Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, Provençal, and Celtic. Some words are abbreviated. Narbon. presumably stands for the town of Narbonne in southwestern France, but what about Car. and Carcas.? Perhaps the neighboring city of Carcassonne, perhaps not. Many words are anagrams or symbols. Commentators have suggested that the great Chyren designated King Henri or Henry (Henryc in Provençal). Rapis was Paris, thePhoacean port Marseille, the lion a war chief, the Castulon monarque Emperor Charles V. Snakes stood for heretics. Whites and reds designated French magistrates who wore robes of that color. This is plausible but not more since Nostredame did not leave a glossary. And what about the great wounded one, the big cape, the white feather, and what he called la grande grande? Some words hang between opposite meanings (resserer could mean to lock or to unlock). Predictions likewise seem to posit one thing and its contrary. An unnamed monarchy would see its power increase and diminish in 1553; the summer of 1557 would be one of drought and floods. Strange things would happen, too. “Nourishing the rock the deep white clay / From a cleft below takes its milky birth” (quatrain 1.21). Contemporaries may have found it easier to figure this out than we do, five centuries later, but not always.¹²

Nostredame left so many words out. Sometimes, it is the subject of a sentence: “Dispatched without much resistance.” Sometimes, it is an article, a preposition, or an adverb. “Battle, death, defeat” in the 1727 quatrain may be a chronological sequence—or not. Adjectives and qualifying clauses regularly end up far from the nouns they modify. This resembles Latin, except that Latin syntax and morphology compensate for loose word order and prevents such ambiguity. Take “For him great people without faith and law will die” (a literal translation of the third line of quatrain 2.9). Does it mean that people will die without faith and law? That, according to this person (“him”), they lacked faith and law? Or that a faithless, lawless individual will provoke the demise of this people? (In this case, we might follow a recent translator and render the line as “For this lawless one a great people dies.”) It might be something else altogether—hard to tell. The words of Nostradamus hang together in some fashion, but, without the glue of punctuation, conjunctions, and conventional word order, they are unmoored. Like bumper cars, they collide and crash and tap into each other’s kinetic force. New relationships are forged while old ones come to an end, in a process of perpetual renewal.¹³

Other poets and prognosticators used Latin constructions or elided articles, but none did so with Nostredame’s resolve. Here, too, he piled it on. No wonder that people asked him for clarifications. When customers complained about indecipherable horoscopes, Nostredame blamed his poor handwriting. His secretaries were too harried to pore over his scribblings, or to mind their own handwriting while copying his manuscripts. Some filled in the blanks themselves, a move that seldom yielded clarity of meaning. His poor penmanship had larger consequences yet in the world of print. Once a manuscript arrived in a workshop, a printer read it out to a typesetter, who then picked characters and composed sentences. This was done in haste, in order to publish as much as possible and make the best use of a short supply of movable type. The perils are obvious: words could be mistaken for their homonyms; apostrophes and punctuation could disappear.¹⁴

Without original manuscripts at our disposal, it is difficult to ascertain how much his texts suffered from this process. But Nostredame lived far from the printing shops of Lyon. On at least one occasion, he lambasted a printer for mutilating his manuscript (these were his own words). Close readers have tracked minute variations between editions of his works. One has tendues (tense) where the other has rendues (returned); or mois (month) where the other has moins (less). Nostredame’s eagerness to publish exacerbated the problem. This may explain why one surviving copy of the Prophecies is missing two quatrains and another one, from the same publisher in 1557, is not. Contemporaries thus read editions that differed in small but significant ways from what Nostredame had written. There is no original version of the Prophecies. Pinning Nostradamus down has always been a hopeless task.¹⁵

Translation into English or Italian added another remove from this original. Foreign publishers picked and chose within the French editions while deciding what to translate. This came at a cost. The Almanac for the Yere 1562, for instance, consisted of portents that Nostredame had written for 1555. Elsewhere, commas vanished. In one portent, le jeune meurt (“the young one dies”) became “the oldest died.” All Renaissance translations were vulnerable to such alterations. Once authors turned in their manuscripts, they typically lost control. Without page proofs to correct, they could not prevent errors and unwanted modifications. Still, while no authors were safe, those who penned poetic or predictive works in which every word mattered had the most at stake.¹⁶

Some of Nostradamus’s obscurity might thus be involuntary. The same is true of his stylistic predilections, his affection for Provençal place-names, and the demands of poetic meter (which led him to omit, invert, or truncate words). To this may be added fascination with the past. The humanist in him looked back to antiquity and Byzantium while the astrologer studied vast planetary cycles. His publications are full of references to Roman leaders, omens, and ceremonies. Nostredame may have sought out analogies between Roman and French history. After all, by publishing the Prophecies, Nostredame hoped to secure the recognition of patrons and educated elites. He may also have wanted to further impress readers with his learning and predictive abilities. While some of them recognized these references, others must have deemed them mystifying.¹⁷

But not everything was accidental. Nostredame also relished obscurity in his publications. He told Jean de Vauzelles that he had purposefully concealed the meaning of his almanacs under obscure words. Perhaps he sought to express the volatility of his era, the instability of the human condition, the hidden workings of the world, or the mysteries of the cosmos. In the late 1540s, after all, he wrote a long poetic rendering in French of the hieroglyphics of Horapollo (long unknown, it was found in a French library in 1967). The latter, a Greek treatise on Egyptian hieroglyphics, had been written in the fifth century AD near Alexandria, rediscovered in 1419, and published in 1505. Dozens of editions, translations, and commentaries followed, many of them by Neoplatonist humanists who, inspired by these lapidary signs, devised enigmas, anagrams, and other symbolic modes of expression. Hieroglyphics now surfaced in courtly festivals, princely entries into cities, and poems—part of a vibrant symbolic repertoire that would disclose its secrets to learned initiates.¹⁸

On a personal level, obscurity was the entry badge into a brotherhood of prognosticators who shared a command of mysterious languages and esoteric bodies of knowledge. Expertise led to authority. Nostredame’s obscurity might also show that he grasped the danger of saying too much, or saying things too clearly, during volatile times. Self-protection was a necessity for sixteenth-century soothsayers, who had to placate secular rulers as well as religious authorities. From Flanders to England, statutes banned predictions and prophecies that threatened public order or the ruler’s majesty. Some prognosticators thus refused to ascribe a binding status to their predictions. Others used coded words and kept out vital information. This is how Nostredame presented his situation. He had long kept silent, he said in the Prophecies, because his predictions were likely to incense powerful individuals. He would now speak out, but in “cryptic sentences” and “under a cloudy figure.” In due time, people would realize that events had occurred as he had predicted. In due time, they would understand what he had meant to say. As religious and political crises intensified, however, Nostredame grew convinced that Christendom was moving toward a moment of reckoning in which everything, truth as much as evil deeds, would rise to the surface. “Will be discovered what has been hidden for so long.” He returned repeatedly to this theme, promising imminent revelations regarding plots or conjurors. As a voice of truth, he could no longer keep quiet.¹⁹

Still, he had to protect the fragile sentiments of coarse readers who could neither grasp nor handle such news. He used coded warnings, he said, to avoid intimidating the populace. Truth would remain the preserve of the cognoscenti, capable of reading between the lines. Others would feed on illusions—for the time being perhaps. This was an ancient notion, found in oracular and hermetic traditions as well as in Renaissance commentaries on the book of Revelation, commonly seen as a puzzling moral allegory. It also permeated literary circles. Poets lived in elevated, allegorical worlds and safeguarded mysteries against the profane. Petrarch’s poetry, a veil that aroused marvel before divine mystery, protected the ignorant while opening itself up to the learned and wise. Maurice Scève likewise conveyed truth to those pure, elevated souls who took the time to parse enigmatic verses. Some poets thus accepted that Nostredame could not express himself any other way. Others, however, felt that clarity was the poet’s first virtue and the play of light and obscurity his modus operandi. Arcane words and verbal disorder could not reign unchallenged.²⁰

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The matter remained unresolved, but one thing was plain to all: Nostradamus’s uncompromising bleakness. “Battle, death, defeat,” the last verse of the 1727 quatrain, could serve as the Prophecies’ subtitle. Elsewhere, Nostredame spoke of fire and floods and so much bloodshed that rivers ran red. His contemporaries may have been inured to such language. Violence had after all suffused poetry since the Middle Ages, and unforeseen catastrophes filled the plays of Shakespeare a few decades later, revealing hardship behind apparent well-being. And yet Nostredame stood out here as well. The gentleman Guillaume de Marconville remarked that he alone among prognosticators foresaw both political and religious upheaval for 1563. Two decades later, a pamphleteer brought gloomy tidings but deemed it necessary to insist that he was no Nostradamus.²¹

This is because Nostredame drew readers into a harrowing world in which “hunger, burning fever, fire and from blood smoke” make up the daily lot. Animals are invariably ferocious, fields barren, wars great and deadly, peace unlikely to hold. Enemies lurk and factions conspire. They also plot, rearm, attack. Fires break out at sunrise, assaults are launched on the borders. Counting words can take us only so far, but it says something that black and night outnumber white by three to one and that death is seven times more present than life. The recurring words are famine and plague, unrest and calamity, tumult and oppression, sedition and plunder. The West trembles, said Nostredame. It lives in a state of perpetual emotion. Nothing can last when appearances deceive and upheavals turn things upside down: “Everything will be changed, frustrated, transmuted, thwarted.” The healthy fall ill; the cheerful grow morose. Friends turn into enemies, harmony into chaos. Everywhere, Nostredame saw doubt and “doubte double.” The idea of transformation was as central to people’s daily experiences as it was to alchemy, with its modifications of grapes and metals. Here, it metastasized into an all-encompassing “renovation of reigns and centuries.”²²

All was suffering, both physical and psychological. As a horoscope writer, Nostredame was accustomed to probing the innermost reaches of the human psyche. And what he found rarely proved appealing. Hidden rancor governed all relationships. The powerful trampled the weak. Friends betrayed friends. Malice and perversity overcame loyalty and bred the illusion of virtue. War had long constituted the most heroic of topics for poets, but there was no room for bravery or epic glory in this landscape. The century’s adversity brought out the worst in people: “The good will be followed by the evil.” Inklings of hope surfaced here and there: a declining intensity of war and disease in 1550, France spared invasions in 1555. Mere respites all. Expect constant escalation and paroxysms of misery, said Nostredame. Troubles were a hundred times worse than the previous year. The misfortunes that awaited the planet were as devastating as Nero’s fiery destruction of Rome. Historical comparisons become indispensable when calamities have no equivalents in human memory.²³

Readers could not be blamed for taking this at face value in the sixteenth century. The European population doubled, causing inflation to jump and wages to stagnate. This pressure was especially strong in the countryside, where disastrous harvests and changes in agriculture and feudal relations left peasants freer but also more vulnerable. Thousands sold their landholdings and moved to towns. The price of grain practically quadrupled over the century. One witness reported in 1586 that peasants were eating bread made of acorns, roots, fern, brick, and sprinklings of flour. They were fortunate: others had nothing but grass. Coupled with high feudal dues and tax increases, famine was a recipe for riots, and there were plenty. Religious conflicts yielded new heights of bitterness and cruelty in the name of true faith. States raised quasi-permanent armies and now waged war during all seasons. Muskets, mines, and crossbows caused new kinds of wounds. Beyond the battlefields, soldiers and deserters marauded, plundered, destroyed crops, and sacked towns. It was no longer clear who protected whom.²⁴

Provence was spared nothing, neither riots nor invasion by the armies of Emperor Charles V, neither repression of heretics nor religious conflicts of rare violence. It was in this crucible that Nostredame grew up and then lived his adult life. He saw it all firsthand: the suffering and the dying, the violence and the persecutions. In 1561, Catholic peasants rose up against Protestants, whom they viewed as threats to their traditions and community. In Salon, they roamed the streets and burned houses. When they accused Nostredame of harboring Protestant beliefs, he took refuge in Avignon with his family. (This, too, points toward his Catholicism. A Protestant fleeing a Catholic mob might have opted for the nearby Huguenot stronghold of Nîmes rather than the papal enclave of Avignon.) Nostredame waited for the governor to restore order before returning to Salon, but he could not shake his despondency before this course of events. He wrote bitterly to a customer about a “popular fury that is bordering on madness.” The injustice and cruelty that he had witnessed further convinced him that he lived in wretched times. He went on: “Freedom is oppressed, religion corrupted. War imposes silence on the law, all are full of fear and see things turning to insatiable carnage, bloodshed, fire, in short—as you said—toward civil war. However, we are not at the end of our troubles and we have not yet reached the bottom.”²⁵

Nostradamus clearly partook in the eschatological mood that had spread across the continent and the British Isles. Eschatology, which refers to the last days of history and what lies beyond, includes several strands. The apocalyptic one revolves around a divine message announcing the final struggle between good and evil, the Last Judgment, and the advent of a celestial kindgom in which injustice will be redressed. The millennialist strand postulates the advent of a Golden Age of happiness. The kingdom of Christ and his saints will overturn sinful, worldly rule and last a thousand years (or some other time span), until the Last Judgment. The messianic strand, finally, announces the arrival of a messiah who will champion divine justice in the struggle between good and evil. Beyond their differences, all three share a vision of history as divinely predetermined and structured, gloom regarding an era that was mired in crisis, and belief in the impending triumph of good over evil.²⁶

The Protestant Reformation contributed to eschatological thought. For one, it made the Gospels available to laypeople. Matthew 24:7 is among the better-known verses: “Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines and pestilences, and earthquakes.” Countless Protestants also saw themselves as true believers who launched the final battle againt the papal Antichrist. The Reformation itself was seen as a sign that the Last Days had begun. It was not the only one. Unbaptised natives were found and then exterminated in the New World. Charles V sacked Rome in 1527. And the Turks advanced into the Balkans and threatened the Mediterranean. Europeans looked at this Ottoman Empire with fascination, dread, and repulsion. Turkish piety might provide a model for the regeneration of a true Christian kingdom, but these satanic legions could also devastate Europe. The prophecies that had proliferated since the siege of Constantinople in 1453 said as much. Nostredame rarely named the Ottomans in his publications, but he spoke often of barbarians and infidels from the Orient.²⁷

Europeans of all social backgrounds thus made sense of their world through an eschatological prism. There was a surge of astrological prophecy, increasingly focused on the Last Judgment and the struggle against Satan. Even if many Christians contemplated their future with equanimity, this outlook permeated broad swathes of European society. One finds it in sermons and processions, in prophecies and commentaries on the book of Revelation (growing numbers of people now accepted that it referred to their era), and especially in almanacs. A Swiss medical student was stunned by the number of apocalyptic prophecies circulating around Montpellier in 1568. This outlook may well have found its purest expression in the prognostications and quatrains of Nostradamus, which were caught between apocalypticism and cyclical millennialism, but invariably and unmistakingly dark.²⁸

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Some of Nostredame’s publishers played up the darkness. In 1559, an English almanac that was attributed to Nostradamus included a portent about fear, pillages, and epidemics on its cover. An Italian publisher likewise announced “horrendous things to understand” on the title page of one of Michele Nostradame’s prognostications. This helps explain the reports of Nostradamus-induced panic in London and Toulouse in the early 1560s. But these outbreaks were not that common. His bleak words did more than simply scare people.²⁹

For one, Nostredame outlined peace and reconciliation alongside affliction. He had little taste for gore, bloody atrocities, and fear for the sake of fear. His Prophecies captured the twin dimensions of apocalypticism in ways others did not. The first story he told, a tragic account of looming cataclysms and suffering, is easy to spot. He conveyed pessimism about an era that succumbed to sin and human passions, warned about harsh retribution, and announced violent confrontation between believers and nonbelievers. Nostredame combined a vision of the struggle against the Antichrist with the classical notion of the four ages of humanity. Decline set in after a Golden Age of justice and happiness and led to ages of silver, bronze, and—most ominous of all—iron. Nostredame could not exclude the possibility that the age of iron had returned, heralding what he called the great chaos.³⁰

And yet, unlike those prophets who obsessed about the world’s end and provided its imminent date, Nostredame broached the topic intermittently; he had the impression that it approached; and he placed it in a distant future. He never engaged in scapegoating, though it was a frequent practice at the time. He also told a second story, this one about universal peace under a great monarch and people who overcame their ignorance or nastiness, acknowledged their faults, repented, and could thus reenter society. Omnipotent, stern, and sometimes angry, his God punished those who neglected divine laws. But He was more merciful than vengeful and did not allow human beings to suffer more than they could endure. One could placate God through duty and sincere devotion. Drawing from a prophetic tradition that told readers to accept the magnanimity of God and heed divine warnings, Nostredame conjured up dreadful visions before intimating that a compassionate God would “help the poor populace, and any human creatures who feared and loved Him.” All was not lost. The historian Denis Crouzet has recently gone farther and depicted Nostredame as an evangelical humanist (in the tradition of Erasmus) who sought to open the hearts of his brethren to an all-powerful, sometimes angry, but loving God. The prophet’s cryptic and dark words thus plunged readers into a haze of confusion that called not for elucidation but instead for awareness of one’s weaknesses and for quiet awe before an unfathomable divine Mystery. There was nothing to understand besides the importance of faith in this benevolent deity. Whether or not one accepts this depiction of an evangelical Nostredame (few if any contemporaries viewed him as such), this is indeed the God that he outlined for his readers.³¹

If the words of Nostradamus did more than scare contemporaries, it is also because they slipped in time and space. We now associate this name with the future, but in the sixteenth century (and for some time after that), it straddled past, present, and future. After all, Nostredame wrote during an era in which the West’s understanding of time was changing. As they looked back toward antiquity, humanists could discern the changes that had transformed the world during past centuries. Linear notions of a break with the past and constant advances were coming into focus. But humanists also uncovered commonalities among distant eras. Some things stayed the same, or resurfaced again and again. Civilizations could mirror one another across centuries. New conceptions of time thus coexisted with old ones. So it is with Nostredame, who once again brought it all together. His conjunctions hinged on a cyclical notion of time, in which past figures and political states returned at set intervals. Cycles of growth, renewal, and decline governed history. Nostradamus’s prophecies also involved biblical time: the progressive unveiling of a hidden message, the ineluctability of the Apocalypse, and a future age that was free from the corruption of the material world. The Roman idea of Fortuna, or chance, with its unpredictable yet formidable disturbances, was present as well. Out of this overlay came a vision of time as cause and outcome of radical and sometimes violent changes. When Nostredame spoke of “transmutations of time,” he endowed time with a dynamic energy and intimated that it was an active force of change, able to modify, improve, and obliterate. “From good to evil time will change.” The past heralded, programmed, and provided signs of the present.³²

The present and the future, too, were intertwined. “It is not easy for me to distinguish the present from the past, or the past from the future,” Rosenberger wrote Nostredame after reading his latest horoscope. Time clearly moves in some quatrains, propelling readers into vast cycles and commotions. But it is a time without regular flow, a fleeting present that draws from the past and morphs into the future. Words are never limited to any one era. Countless lines are bathed in vague chronology: “Here is the month for evils so many as to be doubted.” Others lack verbs and hence float above time, or else switch between present and past tenses. The following is typical: “Venom, cruel action, ambition replete, weak one injured.” It is a prediction for September 1557 but also a comment on current affairs and a consideration on human passions and interactions. It is ultimately about people making choices, entering into conflicts, and suffering consequences. Nostredame is discussing the tragedy and comedy of life—present, future, and eternal.³³

His geography, too, crossed boundaries. Editions of the Prophecies often included the following subtitle: Represents Part of What Is Now Happening in France, in England, in Spain, and in Other Parts of the World. Readers thus gained “world explanations” about the known continents—especially Europe. Crossing rivers and oceans, Nostredame took them on a vast journey from London to Algiers by way of the Balkans and Tuscany. Such references endowed his words with authority since divine visions are typically broad in scope. They also enabled readers from diverse locales to locate predictions about their city or country. This was especially true for the French, whose country is mentioned in 28 percent of the quatrains (Italy and Britain come next). TheProphecies refer to eighty-five French cities. France surfaces as a physical place and the home of what Nostredame called the French people. It also constitutes an anthropomorphic entity that he addressed directly: “France, if you pass beyond the Ligurian sea, / Within isles & seas you shall be enclosed.” France, finally, was the state governed by a “Gallic monarch.” Siding with this ruler, Nostredame forecast victories for the country, signaled threats, and warned against costly letdowns.³⁴

By the sixteenth century, Europe had resonated for at least two centuries as a cultural entity, with shared saints and charters. Aristocrats, traders, and humanists met and corresponded with counterparts from other countries. Maps and historical accounts proliferated. Europeans could define themselves against American natives and eastern barbarians. Still, feelings of continental identity remained weak. While Nostredame’s references to far-flung European cities may have spread a common geographical vocabulary, it is not clear that they deepened a shared sense of belonging. Would Bavarians empathize with populations facing rabid dogs in Liguria? Some people might relate to such perils and feel compassion, but they might just as easily view them as distant, inconsequential threats.³⁵

The same held true for France. By addressing the country, speaking about it at length, and describing “folk from the vicinity of Tarn, Lot & Garonne” and other regions, Nostredame certainly brought France to life on the page. He enabled readers to visualize its cities and regions, to picture looming dangers, and to appreciate its glory. Nostredame exemplifies a growing interest in France’s topography in the late Renaissance. Geographers and poets alike now provided tangible depictions of French regions, waterways, and mountains. They deployed rich images to contemplate this world and imprint the minds of their readers. Henri II requested maps of his provinces and Catherine de Médicis contemplated a vast cartography of the French territory. Nostredame drew from this geographical effervescence—picking place-names out of contemporary guidebooks—and also contributed to what the literary critic Tom Conley has elegantly termed “topographies of sensation and experience.”³⁶

Some might conclude that the Prophecies contributed to budding national sentiment, the sense of belonging to a community founded in a common language, territory, and shared character. To be sure, French was making inroads and the monarchy was broadening its powers. It incorporated provinces such as Brittany, granted itself exclusive rights to coin money and declare war, expanded its justice system and bureaucracy, and sought a cultural radiance that would surpass Italy’s. Still, it struggled to collect taxes, put down peasant rebellions, and govern unruly nobles and provincial institutions. The country was far from unified, with its innumerable dialects, independent provinces, English enclaves, and papal possessions. Provinces and towns retained their own legal customs, fiscal regimes, and even weights and measures. It is not clear, therefore, that a strong sense of Frenchness was in place by this time, that new forms of nationhood were taking form, or that we can speak, as one scholar recently did, of “literary nationalism.” Rather than abstract national sentiments, Nostredame’s references to France were more likely to denote fidelity to a monarch whose maps, as a royal geographer put it, displayed the breadth, greatness, and might of the Gallic kingdom.³⁷

Still, the words of Nostredame also imprinted space with meaning and anchored contemporaries in specific places while allowing them to contemplate expansive vistas. His readership included not only French men and women but also members of a literate French-speaking elite realm that spilled out beyond the kingdom’s borders, toward Savoie and Lorraine, Geneva and Brussels. All of them could uncover France and much else as well in a literary work that belonged to a broader world and encompassed it, too. Nostredame, poet of the Gallic realm, cautiously celebrated the French dynasty while nourishing a vast topographical imagination.

In one respect, Nostredame provided a screen on which readers could uncover or project expanses that were distant in place or time. The images that fluttered on his pages offered a mesmerizing spectacle whose relationship to their lives was as real or tenuous as they wished it to be. In another respect, Nostredame furnished a mirror of his times. As they immersed themselves in his publications, readers could identify people, places, and events such as the Spanish victory over the French at Saint-Quentin in 1557. Many recognized depictions of the era’s hardships and felt those major shifts that, from print and the Reformation to far-flung voyages and the new astronomy, altered their lives or the way they saw the world. All was in flux.

To some extent, so was Nostradamus, with these impenetrable words and fragmented prophecies. But his regular predictions also cushioned the confusion. Nostredame fashioned an organized, predictable universe in which occurrences were part of series, and series were linked to other series. His almanacs always resembled those of years past. His prognostications invariably followed the same month-by-month template. And the Prophecies were codified strings of one hundred quatrains, a premodern metric pattern that provided a pleasing sense of harmony. There were surprises and reversals in his world, but there were always such surprises and reversals, and they always took the same form. Readers could expect them in every centurie just as they could expect the same words, situations, and conflicts. Nostredame never deviated or disappointed. Like canvases in a series by Mondrian, individual quatrains drew from the same pictorial language and thematic palette and yet subtly departed from one another. The parts were autonomous, but the whole was greater than the parts. Everything held together.³⁸

Everything was also full of meaning—so much so that readers could believe that something lay behind the words even if they could not make sense of individual quatrains. Nostredame’s references to strange figures, plots, and collusions unveiled the workings of this chaotic world. He seemed to have inside knowledge of the hidden forces that governed people’s lives. This is also part of the appeal of the book of Revelation, but other publications promised similar insights at this time. Chapbooks (or canards) were affordable, simply written booklets that related dramatic or sensational news items, such as crimes, floods, and earthquakes. Histoires tragiques were longer and stylistically more ambitious stories and tragedies. Like Nostredame, their authors used predictive or prophetic language to express a fascination with afflictions and depicted a climax of horror. All claimed to describe this tumultuous world truthfully, but dramatized it in a vivid language of violence, marvel, and fright. All also oscillated between distance and the likeness of shared pathos. The words of Nostradamus helped contemporaries sacralize their world and bolster connections with a divine realm, but that is not all they did. They also named the era’s confusion, anchored it within a linguistic framework, gave it dramatic tension, and expressed what readers sensed but could not—or dared not—put into words. Opacity and darkness could prove meaningful for people who contemplated the present and the future with stupefaction.³⁹

Attentive readers could also discern a just, harmonious moral order in these publications. This, too, proved meaningful. If things were dismal in the sixteenth century, Nostradamus seemed to say, it was because so many people were transgressing divine commandments, human laws, and moral norms. Counterfeiters, pillagers, thieves, rebels, and adulterers who participated in “extraordinary fornication” harmed men, women, and children. The danger came from those people who, as Nostredame repeated again and again, broke human and divine laws and disregarded the natural hierarchies that kept the social order standing. The late Renaissance made much of the notion that a great chain of being structured the universe. God resided at the top, above the celestial order. Below that, humanity served as a bridge toward the material realm. Then came the animal kingdom, plants, and rocks at the bottom. Monarchs and manual laborers were the bookends of a human hierarchy of dignity and authority, with aristocrats above ordinary folk, men above women, the old above the young. People were expected to accept the lot that they had been given at birth, obey their superiors, and remain loyal.⁴⁰

But the Renaissance also provided new opportunities for social promotion. Print, trade, and the growth of cities nourished aspirations that challenged the status quo. Nostredame denounced ambition and the quest for riches. “Life is of more value than money or treasure,” he wrote. At the top of society, he said, treason and disloyalty were sowing sedition. Lower down, insolence caused disrespect and riots. Religious sects further exacerbated discord by preying on the weak. The cross was disgraced, said the quatrain quoted earlier. In a world that pitted one social group against another, a world that neglected nurturing relationships, a world that was losing track of faith and law, “the yearning for hierarchy will not be vain at all.” Such admonitions did not come out of nowhere. During times of change, prophets commonly reminded people of the moral content of ancient traditions. Chapbooks and histoires tragiques often ended with disquisitions on human passions and divine punishment. Other almanacs linked duplicity to mayhem during the Wars of Religion (1562–98) and later condemned threats to the social order. Nostredame channeled a disquiet that, ironically, responded to social and technological changes from which he benefited and to which he contributed. The contradictions of Nostradamus include the man’s relationship to his own yearnings and behavior.⁴¹

This led him to fashion a universe that defined standards of conduct and spelled out the consequences of infractions. Stay in your place. Respect laws. Obey the church. Beware of sects. Nostradamus conveys the yearning for social order that saturated prophetic tracts as well as the conservative tenor of apocalypticism and horror tales, whose strict divides between good and evil tend to embrace tradition and erect moral absolutes. Nostredame the establishment figure, the friend of princes and powerful aristocrats, denounced reform and resistance. In his epistle to Henri II, he admonished towns, provinces, and countries that had abandoned their original ways in pursuit of liberty. Eventually, he said, they would return to the right path.

This being said, mighty individuals could also fall or meet harsh fates in Nostradamus’s world. The high would be put low and the low put high: “From all sides the great ones will be afflicted.” They, too, were vulnerable. Here is Nostredame the outsider, cautiously challenging protocols and privilege. The social hierarchy that he upheld had to rest on well-understood duties. If a mighty lord could hand out charity one day and find himself begging for alms the next, it was partly due to the vagaries of fortune. More often, it was because he had neglected his responsibilities. Those who suffered the steepest falls had lied, betrayed, dishonored, and inflicted violence upon others. They had placed personal gain above their duties toward their underlings or masters. The cruel knight, the disloyal councilor, the immoral bishop, the wayward prince—all would receive their due. “For the great ones every man for himself no joy.”⁴²

This is not to say that Nostredame was a firebrand or an evangelical revolutionary. He did not link the return of a Golden Age to the demise of the powerful. Instead, he used quatrains—a poetic genre that imparted moral precepts—to convey a message of his own and point all readers toward an ethical, virtuous plane in which justice and duty resided above rank and privilege. Princes could deflect forthcoming travails by upholding such justice. As for common folk, their ignorance and savagery were all too obvious. They, too, could succumb to passions and violence. Nostredame did not hold warmer feelings for the rabble than others from his milieu. But God-fearing human beings could have a dignity of their own. Oppression of the populace sowed bitterness and launched new cycles of violence. On a deeper level, it offended equity. Given his dealings with the meek and the powerful, Nostredame could speak to both. Some Europeans thus read him and uncovered order and authority; others found the same order and justice. All could derive comfort and meaning from a universe in which things happen for a reason; a universe in which neglect, cruelty, excessive violence, abuses of power—anything that denies people their humanity and threatens social stability—are neither unnoticed nor free of consequences. This was a universe that contemporaries could somehow make their own.

*   *   *

Nostradamus nowadays conjures up images of unremitting fear. During the Renaissance, things played out in more subtle ways. Some writers responded to calamities such as the plague by conceding that language could never convey the unspeakable. They wrote about what they could not express, or told readers that the only thing such disasters could teach them was that the world was meaningless. Nostredame, however, captured what contemporaries called matters of the times (affaires du temps) and placed them in broader cosmological and moral universes. His cryptic and ominous words tapped cosmic forces and pointed toward divine, eternal, and universal designs. At the same time, they embraced the breaks and misfortunes of the world in which people lived their lives; they told meaningful stories about what Nostredame called “a sinister age”; and they outlined paths of conduct and collective fates while accepting that there might never be full closure. Nostredame told readers that everything was linked, that everything came together, and yet that discontinuity governed the world. It was all there.⁴³

As a writer, Nostredame was perpetually on the move, making his way from prose to poetry, prediction to prescription, depiction to exclamation, warning to precept. He was not necessarily the best at any one of these genres. But the man who journeyed across realms without fully belonging to any one could grasp them from the inside and from the outside. His words could convey the conflicting forces and aspirations that propelled the Renaissance world forward in chaotic and often disconcerting ways. His readers could recognize what was true and immediate, imagine what was distant yet plausible, and feel tremors that launched personal transformations.⁴⁴

From our twenty-first-century vantage point, this is both foreign and familiar. We recognize the desire to delve into horror and keep it at bay. We understand why people sought to come to terms with changes that proved disorienting—or welcome and disorienting at the same time. And we discern yet other facets of a media culture that made distant expanses tangible as well as relevant. Rather than drawing readers into escapist realms, Nostredame expanded time and space and fostered a sense of being in the world. If we squint a little while parsing his words, we might even glimpse premises of the Economist, Oprah, and true crime. The National Enquirer or Paris-Match? Not so much.⁴⁵