The Lost Book of
Nostradamus
NOSTRADAMUS:
THE PROPHECIES
Basic,
literalistic translations based on the earliest editions (1555; September 1557;
1568, printings ‘A’ and ‘X’), with thanks to Gary Somai and others for their
archival research
Preliminary notes
1. Format - The original French Prophecies are written in vers
commun – i.e. rhymed decasyllables, with a caesura (or hiatus) after
the fourth syllable of each line. Ideally, any English translation should
reflect this. In the present case, however, a more literalistic approach is
followed for the benefit of those who prefer to get as close as possible to the
original wording. It needs to be remembered, though, that French words do not
mean English words, and that the meaning of a text (especially a poetic one)
goes well beyond its mere surface lexicon.
2. Spellings - Nostradamus’s handwriting was notoriously difficult to
read. Consequently the assistant who dictated the text to the compositor (as
was normal practice at the time) often misidentified his words. Since there was
no established system of spelling at the time, the compositor then spelt them
in the best way that he could, even in the case of proper names with which he
was totally unfamiliar. He also committed all the usual typesetting errors of
the time, such as substituting ‘f’ for ‘ſ’ (long ‘s’), ‘n’
for ‘u’ and vice versa. As a result, the printed spellings are unreliable, and
the sounds of the words are often more revealing than their actual
letters. A good example is provided by the first line of quatrain VI.17 (see
below), where the dictating assistant has read livres (‘books’) as limes
(‘files, rasps’), and the compositor has set assignés (‘indicted’) as asiniers
(‘ass-drivers’).
3. Punctuation - The evidence of the Orus Apollo manuscript
suggests that Nostradamus, not unusually for the time, didn’t punctuate his
verses. The punctuation must therefore be regarded as the printer’s copyright,
not Nostradamus’s. Since it is evident from the spellings (see above) that the
compositor had little idea of the meaning of much of what he was setting, his
punctuation should therefore be regarded as purely formal, rather than as
having much to do with the sense of the text.
4. Grammar - Nostradamus routinely uses the simple infinitive as a
future tense. He also frequently omits both pronouns and prepositions, on the
supposed model of the Latin of the Roman poet Virgil, who was regarded at the
time as the ‘Prince of Poets’. Meanwhile his verbal and adjectival agreements
are often based on proximity, rather than on sense as modern practice insists.
5. ‘False Friends’ In the approved manner of the day, Nostradamus usually prefers to
use his French words in their original Latin senses. In addition, many French
words and phrases have changed their meanings since Nostradamus’s day. Thus, in
the original, the word siècle corresponds to ‘cycle’ or ‘age’, not
‘century’; plusieurs to ‘many’, not ‘several’; insulte to
‘attack’, not ‘insult’; seur to ‘sure’; combien que to
‘although’; ciel (like its Latin original) sometimes to ‘region’ instead
of ‘sky’; pour and par are virtually interchangeable; devant
can stand for avant; ains corresponds to ‘but’ after a negative;
un grand (in the absence of a following noun) is ‘a noble’ or ‘a lord’; and
the sign ‘&’ seems to represent a squiggle in Nostradamus’s
manuscript that can stand both for ‘and’ and for ‘or’ (and possibly for other
small particles as well, such as ‘but’ and ‘of’).
6. Editions - Successive editions of the Prophecies are known to
have become markedly more corrupt as time went on.
7. This translation
- In the following translations, the verse-numbering reflects that of the
original 1555 edition, as reproduced in the relevant online facsimiles. Thus,
the Century-numbers (i.e. Book-numbers) are indicated by Roman numerals, the
quatrain-numbers by Arabic figures. However, for ease of reference, each
Century (or Book) is headed in modern style. In addition, given that it has
been increasingly recognized ever since the 18th century that most of
Nostradamus’s Prophecies are based on historical antecedents – on the
basis of the contemporary conviction that ‘what goes around comes around’ – a
note of each quatrain’s likely origin is inserted where known (adjusted in the
light of the latest research), since this can help to establish the true
context (and thus the intended meaning) of the words. Prime among such sources
are the anonymous Mirabilis Liber of 1522/3, the 1549/50 Livre de
l’estat et mutation des temps by Richard Roussat, the fourth-century Julius
Obsequens’s On Omens, the writings of the classical historians Suetonius
and Livy (to say nothing of Plutarch) and, in matters of style and imagery, the
Roman poet Virgil and the almost contemporary German Poet Laureate Ulrich von
Hutten (see woodcut).
Throughout, square brackets indicate
alternative readings and/or editorial comments.
8. Sequence - Despite continual efforts by enthusiasts to sequence the Prophecies,
their order appears to be entirely random. Certainly they are largely undated.
However, Nostradamus does seem to have been influenced by whatever published
work he happened to be studying at the time, and this results in a certain
amount of thematic ‘clumping’. This is insufficient, though, to justify any
effort at sequencing here.
The
Prophecies
Century
1
I.1
[evocation of the Delphic Oracle,
after Iamblichus’s De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum]
Being seated by night in secret
study,
alone resting on the bronze stool,
a slight flame emerging from solitude
makes utter what it is not vain to believe.
I.2
[evocation of the Branchidic Oracle,
after Iamblichus’s De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum]
Wand placed in hand in the central
place [shrine] of Branchis,
with the water he wets both hem and foot.
Vapour, and voices thrill through his sleeves.
Divine splendour. The divine[r] sits down nearby.
I.3
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 152 BC, or possibly Augustin de Zarate]
When the litter is overturned by the
whirlwind,
and faces shall be covered by their cloaks,
the state shall be upset by new people.
Then whites and reds [the judges] shall judge contrarily.
I.4
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
Throughout the world one Monarch
shall be appointed
who shall not long be at peace or [even] alive.
Then the Bark of the Fisherman [the Church] shall be lost.
It shall be ruled to its greatest detriment.
I.5
[after the 9th-century Annals
of Aniane and Chronicle of Moissac, recording the 8th-century
Saracen invasions of southwestern France]
They shall be driven away without
putting up a long fight.
They shall be harried more strongly through the countryside.
Town and city shall put up stronger resistance:
Carcassonne and Narbonne shall have their courage put to the test.
I.6
[source unidentified]
The eye [ruler] of Ravenna
shall be removed from office,
when wings shall fail his [speeding] feet:
the two [leaders] from Bresse shall have established
Turin and Vercelli, which the Gauls shall trample.
I.7
[after the De Orbo Novo of
1533 by Peter Martyr]
Arrived late, the execution done,
the wind contrary [against the odds], letters seized en route.
The conspirators, fourteen of one sect:
news of the project bruited via the Redhead [reed].
I.8
[source unidentified]
How many times captured, solar city [Rome?],
you shall change the Barbarian laws and vain:
Your doom approaches: you shall pay even more tribute.
Great Adria [Venice] shall re-open your veins.
I.9
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
From the Orient shall come Punic
hearts
to vex Adria [Venice] and the heirs of Romulus,
accompanied by the Libyan fleet.
Malta shall quake; and the nearby isles [shall be] deserted.
I.10
[after the Journal
d’un bourgeois de Paris and Philippe de Commynes]
Serpents [Sergeants]
introduced into the iron cage
where the seven children of the King are taken:
the old and fathers shall emerge from the depths of hell,
only to see the death and screams of their offspring.
I.11
[source unidentified]
The movement of minds, hearts, feet
and hands
shall be in accord. In Naples, Leon, Sicily
swords, explosions, waters, then the Roman nobles
submerged, killed, dead through brainless idiocy.
I.12
[after the history of the 13th-century
Veronan tyrant Ezzelino da Romano]
Shortly, it shall be said, a false,
frail brute
shall be quickly elevated from low to high,
then in an instant disloyal and vacillating,
who shall have the government of Verona.
I.13
[source unidentified]
The exiles through anger and inner
hatred
shall mount a great conspiracy against the King:
secretly they shall send in enemies through saps [tunnels],
and stir up sedition against his old retainers.
I.14
[after the contemporary rise of
Protestantism]
From the enslaved people songs,
chants and supplications,
taken captive by princes and lords in the prisons.
In the future by headless idiots
they shall be accepted as divine prayers.
I.15
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
Mars threatens us with his warlike
force.
Seventy times shall he cause blood to be spilt:
the clergy shall rise and fall,
and even more so those who shall want to hear nothing from them.
I.16
[after Richard
Roussat’s Livre de l’estat et mutation des temps of 1549/50]
Scythe [Saturn] conjoined with
Tin [Jupiter] near Sagittarius
at the highest point of its exaltation,
Plague, famine, death by military might:
the age approaches its renewal.
I.17
[after Richard Roussat’s Livre de
l’estat et mutation des temps of 1549/50, citing the Venerable Bede]
For forty years the rainbow shall
not appear:
[then] for forty years it shall be seen each day.
The parched earth shall become even drier,
and [then there shall be] great floods when it appears.
I.18
[after events accompanying François
I’s surprise alliance with the Ottomans of 1543]
Through Gallic discord and
negligence
passage shall be opened to Mahomet:
the land and sea of Siena soaked in blood,
the Phocaean port [Marseille] covered with sails and ships.
I.19
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 105 BC and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives on the Roman Consul
Marius]
When serpents shall circle the
altar,
the Trojan [French royal] blood shall be harassed by the Spaniards:
by them a great number shall be lost,
the chief, fleeing, hidden in ponds and swamps.
I.20
[possibly after the Mirabilis
Liber of 1522/3]
Tours, Orleans, Blois, Angers, Reims
and Nantes,
cities vexed by sudden change [disaster]:
by foreign tongues tents shall be pitched,
rivers, darts at Rennes [sandy rivers], land and sea shall quake.
I.21
[after contemporary excavations of
the nearby Gallo-Roman oppidum of Constantine]
Deep white clay nourishes the rock,
which from an abyss shall come forth milky.
Needlessly troubled, they shall not dare touch it,
unaware that deep down is clayey soil.
I.22
[source unidentified, but probably a
contemporary ‘omen’]
That which shall live without having
any sense,
shall fatally injure its artifice[r]:
to Autun, Chalon, Langres and the two Sens,
hail and ice shall cause great damage .
I.23
[after Gasparus Peucerus’s Teratoscopia
of 1553, describing the omens of 1534]
In the third month, the Sun rising,
the Boar and Leopard on the field of Mars to fight.
The Leopard, worn out, raises its eye to the heavens.
It sees an Eagle frolicking about the Sun.
I.24
[after Livy’s History of Rome
and the omens surrounding the advent of King Tarquin]
At the new city, thinking of
condemnation,
the bird of prey comes to offer itself in the sky.
After victory he shall pardon the captives.
Cremona and Mantua shall have suffered great evils.
I.25
[after the 9th-century
discovery by a shepherd of the alleged tomb of St James at Compostela]
Lost, found, hidden for so long an
age,
the shepherd shall be honoured as a demigod:
but before the Moon finishes its full period
he shall be dishonoured by other desires.
I.26
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 130 BC]
The great one falls to lightning
during daylight hours.
Evil is predicted by the gods’ messenger of protestations:
according to the prediction he falls in the night-time.
Conflict at Reims, London; Tuscany plagued.
I.27
[after the account by Strabo et
al. of the theft in 106 BC of the fabled gold of Toulouse]
Under the mistled oak [of
Guienne] struck from the sky,
not far from there is the treasure hidden
which for long ages had been stolen.
Once found, he shall perish, his eye put out by a spring.
I.28
[after contemporary raids on the
Mediterranean coast]
The Tour de Bouc the Barbarian
galley shall gain
once, then, long after, the Hesperian [Spanish] bark:
cattle, people, chattels, both shall suffer great devastation.
Under Taurus and Libra what a deadly attack!
I.29
[after an unidentified contemporary
omen]
When the fish terrestrial and
aquatic
shall be washed up on the beach by a strong wave,
its form strange, smooth and horrible,
by sea the enemies [shall be] very soon at the walls.
I.30
[after Columbus’s log entry for 26th
May 1494, reported in Grynaeus and Huttich’s Novus Orbis Regionum ac
Insularum Veteribus Incognitarum of 1532]
The foreign ship through stormy seas
shall approach the unknown port,
notwithstanding palm-branch signs.
Afterwards death, pillage: good sense [shall] come late.
I.31
[after the contemporary activities
of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V as King of Spain and the Latin Epigrams
of the Emperor's Poet Laureate Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523)]
So many years the wars in Gaul shall
last,
beyond the ambit of the Castilian monarch:
uncertain victory shall crown three lords.
Eagle, Cock, Moon, Lion, Sun [shall all be] in evidence.
I.32
[after the transfer of papal power
from Rome to Avignon between 1378 and 1417]
The great empire shall soon be
transferred
to a little place that shall very soon grow:
a very lowly place in a tiny county
in the middle of which he shall plant his sceptre.
I.33
[source unidentified]
Near a great bridge on a spacious
plain,
the great lion with Imperial might
shall mount an assault outside a determined city.
Because of fear the gates shall be opened to him.
I.34
[after the standard Roman doctrine
of omens]
The bird of prey flying to the left
before the conflict: the event appears to the French.
One shall take it for good, another for ambiguous or sinister.
The weak party shall take it as a good omen.
I.35
[after Marcus Frytschius’s Chronicle
of Omens and Portents, reporting a cloud-omen seen over Switzerland in 1547
(see woodcut below), and possibly also Villehardouin’s account in his
13th-century Conquest of Constantinople of the deposing of the Emperor
Isaac II Angelus]
The young lion shall overcome the
old
on a battlefield in a single duel.
In a cage of gold he shall put out his eyes:
Two armies joined, then he shall die a cruel death.
I.36
[source unidentified]
Too late the monarch shall repent
him
of not having put his adversary to death:
but he shall consent to something much greater,
namely having all his relations put to death.
I.37
[after Suetonius’s The Twelve
Caesars, II.17, concerning the battle of Actium of 31 BC]
Shortly before the sun sets,
battle given, a great people in doubt.
Destroyed, the marine port makes no reply.
Bridge [funeral] and burial in two foreign places.
I.38
[source unidentified]
The Sun and the Eagle shall appear
to the victor:
the vanquished is reassured with a vain reply.
With a hue and cry the armed men shall not cease their
revenge, if a timely peace is achieved through death.
I.39
[after Suetonius’s The Twelve
Caesars, I.81, concerning the assassination of Julius Caesar, reapplied to
the over-the long reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V]
By night in bed the supreme [leader]
strangled
for having tarried too long, the blond one [once] elected.
The Empire, claimed by three, worn out,
he shall be put to death, the paper and packet unread.
I.40
[after Louis IX’s 1263 reform of the
currency after returning from captivity in Egypt]
The false trumpet [of Discord]
concealing madness
shall bring about a change of regime in Byzantium:
from Egypt there shall emerge one who wishes
edicts debasing monetary alloys to be undone.
I.41
[source unidentified]
City besieged, and assaulted by
night,
few escapees: conflict not far from the sea:
a woman fainting with joy on the return of a son,
poison and letters hidden in the envelope.
I.42
[after Psellus’s De daemonibus,
reprinted in Petrus Crinitus’s De honesta disciplina, of 1504, reprinted
in turn by Gryphius of Lyon in 1552]
The tenth of the Calends of April by
Gothic reckoning [the Gnostic practice]
revived again by wicked folk:
the light put out, a diabolical assembly
seeking out the filth of [described by] Adamantius [Origen] and
Psellus.
I.43
[after Socrates Scholasticus’s (or
Eusebius’s) account of Constantine’s victory at the battle of Saxa Rubra (‘red
rock’) at the Milvian Bridge in AD 312, and its subsequent memorialisation]
Before the change of Empire arrives,
there shall occur a most marvellous event:
the [battle]field disturbed, the pillar of porphyry
placed, transferred onto the rust-coloured rock.
I.44
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3, assimilated to contemporary religious wars]
In short, the [classical pagan]
sacrifices shall return,
transgressors shall be put to martyrdom.
No longer shall there be monks, abbots or novices:
honey shall be much dearer than wax.
I.45
[after the contemporary Journal
d’un bourgeois de Paris, describing the events of 1530, plus the ennoblement
by King Henri II of the poet Étienne Jodelle in 1553, and the sacrifice
of a goat, following a performance of his ground-breaking classical
verse-tragedy Cléopâtre captive]
The sect-finder shall greatly reward
the accuser.
Beast in the theatre, the play set up on stage.
For the ancient act the inventor ennobled.
The world confused and schismatic because of sects.
I.46
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 147 BC, transferred to the French context]
Very near Auch, Lectoure and Mirande
great fire for three nights shall fall from the sky.
A very stupendous and marvellous thing shall occur.
Not long afterwards the earth shall quake.
I.47
[after the contemporary activities
of Jean Calvin]
Of Lake Geneva the sermons shall
annoy.
Days shall turn into weeks,
then months, then years, then all shall faint.
The Magistrates shall condemn their empty laws.
I.48
[after Richard Roussat’s Livre de
l’estat et mutation des temps of 1549/50]
Twenty years of the reign of the
Moon [have] passed,
[after] seven thousand years another shall hold its monarchy.
When the Sun shall take its exhausted days [up again]
then shall my prophecy be accomplished and finished.
I.49
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
Long, long before such events,
those of the East by virtue of the Moon
in the year 1700 shall cause nobles to be carried off,
subjugating almost [the whole of] the northern sector.
I.50
[after Richard
Roussat’s Livre de l’estat et mutation des temps of 1549/50]
From the aquatic triplicity [Cancer,
Scorpio and Pisces] there shall be born
one who shall make Thursday his feast-day:
his fame, praise, rule and power shall grow,
by land and sea storming the East.
I.51
[after Richard
Roussat’s Livre de l’estat et mutation des temps of 1549/50]
Jupiter and Saturn at the Point of
Aries.
Eternal God, what upheavals!
Then for a long age his evil Time returns.
In Gaul and Italy, what stirrings!
I.52
[after Richard Roussat’s Livre de
l’estat et mutation des temps of 1549/50]
The two evil ones [Mars and
Saturn] conjoined in Scorpio,
the great Lord murdered in his hall.
Plague visited on the Church by the new King
in southern and northern Europe.
I.53
[after the Mirabilis Liber
and Spain’s recent access to treasure from the New World]
Alas! We shall see a great people
tormented
and Holy Law in utter ruin.
To other laws all Christendom [shall succumb],
once a new source of gold and silver is found.
I.54
[after Richard
Roussat’s Livre de l’estat et mutation des temps of 1549/50]
Two revolutions made by the evil scythe-bearer
[Saturn],
bring about a change of reign and age:
the movable sign intervenes in its place,
to the two equal in inclination.
I.55
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
In the region/latitude next to the
Babylonian
great shall be the Bloodshed.
For land and sea, air and sky it shall be deleterious.
For sects,
famine; for realms, plagues, confusion.
I.56
[after Richard
Roussat’s Livre de l’estat et mutation des temps of 1549/50]
You shall see great change happen
sooner or later,
extreme horrors and vengeances.
For, as the Moon is conducted by its angel,
heaven is nearing [the end of] its Trepidation [cycle].
I.57
[after Petrus Crinitus’s De
honesta disciplina 1504, citing Petronius’s Satiricon]
In great discord the trumpet shall
blare,
concord broken, lifting its head to heaven:
the bloody mouth shall swim in the blood,
on the ground the face anointed with milk and honey.
I.58
[after an omen reported for 1544,
later to be collected by Lycosthenes (1557)]
The belly sliced, it shall be born
with two heads
and four arms: for some [whole] years it shall live intact.
On the day when Aquileia shall celebrate its festival,
Fossano, Turin, shall follow the leader of Ferrara.
I.59
[after Victor Vitensis’s Historia
Persecutionis Provinciae Africanae (5th century) and/or
Procopius’s De bello Vandalico (6th century)]
The exiles transported to the isles
upon the change to a crueller monarch
shall be murdered and burnt in the flames,
who had not been sparing with their speech.
I.60
[after an unidentified account of
the life of the 13th-century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II von Hohenstaufen,
who was born in Sicily]
An Emperor shall be born near Italy,
who shall cost the Empire very dear:
they shall mock the people with whom he allies himself
and find him less a prince than a butcher.
I.61
[after the formal enactment by the
city council of Geneva of Jean Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Ordinances in
1541]
The miserable unhappy republic
shall be devastated by the new magistrate:
their great multitude, returned from wicked exile,
shall make the Suevi [Swabians] tear up their great contract.
I.62
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
What a great loss shall letters
suffer, alas,
before the cycle of Latona [the Moon] is finished!
Fire, a great deluge, more through ignorant rulers,
than shall be seen again for a long age.
I.63
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
The woes once past, the world [population]
grows smaller.
For a long time peace, the lands [re]populated.
They’ll walk through the region safely by land, sea and water,
then the wars [shall be] stirred up anew.
I.64
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 166 BC and 104 BC]
At night they shall think they have
seen the Sun
when they shall see the half-human pig:
alarums, songs, battles, fighting seen in the sky,
and brute beasts shall be heard to speak.
I.65
[after contemporary omen reports,
and notably one reported for 1548 in Marcus Frytschius’s De meteoris of
1555]
Child without hands: never was so
great a thunderbolt seen:
the royal child wounded while playing tennis.
Broken at the well; lightning-strikes while going there to mill:
three trussed up with chains around their waists.
I.66
[source known]
He who then shall bear the news,
shall shortly afterwards regain his breath.
Viviers, Tournon, Montferrand and Pradelles,
hail and storms shall make them sigh.
I.67
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
The great famine that I feel
approaching,
shall often return, then become universal,
so great and long that they shall tear up
roots from the woods, and babes from the breast.
I.68
[source unidentified]
Oh, what a horrible and miserable
torment,
three innocents who shall be delivered up!
Poison suspected, lack of care, betrayal:
delivered to horror by drunken executioners.
I.69
[after the famous prophetic dream of
Nebuchadnezzar described in the book of Daniel, with the measurement apparently
taken from Josephus’s description of King Herod’s fortress of Masada]
The great mountain seven stadia
around,
after peace, war, famine, flood,
shall roll far, ruining great countries,
even ancient ones, and of mighty foundation.
I.70
[source unidentified]
Rain, famine, ceaseless war in
Persia;
over-confidence shall betray the monarch.
[What is] finished there, [shall have been] begun in Gaul:
A secret omen for someone to be moderate.
I.71
[after the three captures of
Marseille and the Tour St-Jean that guards its harbour by the Saracens in 735,
by Charles d’Anjou in 1252, and by Alphonso V of Aragon in 1423]
The maritime tower three times taken
and retaken
by Spaniards, Barbarians, Ligurians:
Marseille and Aix, Arles by those of Pisa
Laid waste by fire, sword; Avignon pillaged by [those from] Turin.
I.72
[possibly after the Mirabilis
Liber of 1522/3]
Marseille completely changed [for
the worse],
flight and pursuit of its inhabitants as far as the area of Lyon.
Narbonne, Toulouse violated by Bordeaux:
Killed and captured nearly a million.
I.73
[partly after the Mirabilis Liber
of 1522/3]
France assailed on five sides
through negligence,
Tunis, Algiers stirred up by Persians.
Leon, Seville, Barcelona, bankrupt,
shall not have the fleet through the Venetians.
I.74
[after the Emperor Friedrich
Barbarossa’s siege of Antioch in 1097 during the first Crusade]
After tarrying they shall sail to
Epirus:
The great relief shall approach Antioch.
Black Frizzy Beard shall tend strongly towards the Empire:
Barbarossa shall roast him on a spit.
I.75
[after Livy’s History of Rome (xxviii,
46), describing the Carthaginian invasion of northern Italy in 205 BC]
The tyrant of Siena shall occupy
Savona:
The fort won, he shall hold the fleet:
The two armies [shall pass] through the March of Ancona.
Out of fright the chief examines his conscience about it.
I.76
[after the thirteenth-century
Guillaume Le Breton’s Philippiad, a poem in praise of the French King
Philip Augustus, which incorporates the story of King Richard Coeur de Lion
of England]
By a fierce name he shall be
described
whose name the three sisters [the Fates] shall have predicted:
then he shall lead a great throng by word and deed.
More than any other shall he have fame and renown.
I.77
[after the celebrated 11th-12th
century Chanson de Roland]
Between two seas he shall mount a
great attack
who shall then die by the bite of a horse.
His admiral shall furl the black sail
near Gibraltar, and the army near Rocheval [Roncevaux].
I.78
[after Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars
and Divus Claudius]
Weak-headed, he shall be born of an
old chief,
degenerate in knowledge and in arms.
The lord of France feared by its sister [Britain]:
fields divided, granted to the troops.
I.79
[after Étienne Dolet’s 1528
accusation of idolatry directed at Toulouse]
Bazas, Lectoure, Condom, Auch and
Agen
stirred up by laws, plot[s] and monopoly[ies]:
He shall ruin Carcassonne, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Bayonne,
wishing to renew their bull-sacrifice.
I.80
[after contemporary reports of
‘monster’ omens]
From the sixth bright celestial
splendour [Jupiter]
it shall thunder so fiercely in Burgundy.
Then a monster shall be born from a most hideous beast.
March, April, May, June, great schisms and disputes.
I.81
[after the celebrated Templar trials
of 1310]
Of the human flock nine shall be set
apart,
from judgement and counsel removed:
Their fate shall be determined on departure.
Kappa, Thita, Lambda [by gematria 9 + 20 + 30 = 59], dead, banished,
scattered.
I.82
[after the Ottomans’ invasions of
Europe, and their siege of Vienna in 1526]
When the columns of wood [masts]
with a great trembling,
[shall be] driven by the south wind, covered with red ochre,
it [they] shall pour out such a great throng.
Vienna and the land of Austria shall quake.
I.83
[after Plutarch’s Parallel Lives
(‘Pyrrhus’), describing the original ‘Pyrrhic victory’ of 279 BC]
The foreign nation shall divide [up
the] spoils:
Saturn on Mars [turns] his furious gaze.
Horrible slaughter of the Tuscans and Latins
[by] Greeks, who shall be [all too] anxious to strike.
I.84
[in part after the Epigrams
(119.13) of the influential German poet laureate Ulrich von Hutten
(1488-1523) describing a lunar eclipse in the course of a 1516 prophecy for
Pope Leo X]
The Moon hidden in deep shadows,
her brother passes [pale] with rusty colour.
The lord concealed for a long time in his hiding place,
the sword shall cool [he shall hold] in the bloody wound.
I.85
[probably after the rejection in
1549 by Lady Mary Tudor (later Queen Mary of England) of Edward VI’s attempts
to force her to abjure Roman Catholicism]
By the lady’s reply, the King
troubled:
ambassadors shall set their lives at nought.
The lord shall doubly swindle his brothers:
they shall both die through anger, hatred and envy.
I.86
[after Livy, History of Rome,
II.13; Valerius Maximus, Memorable deeds and Sayings, III,2,2; Plutarch,
Life of Poplicola, 19, and On the Virtue of Women, chapter 52; and
Françoys de Billon, Le fort inexpugnable de l’honneur du sexe feminin,
Paris, 1555]
The mighty Queen, when she shall see
herself defeated,
shall show an excess of masculine courage:
on horseback, she shall cross the river completely naked,
pursued by the sword: it shall be an outrage to her given word.
I.87
[after the Annales Cassini’s
description of the first known lava eruption in 1036 of Mount Vesuvius
overlooking Naples (Greek Neapolis = ‘New City’), when the Lombards of
Capua and the Byzantine dukes of Naples were at war over the city]
Earth-shaking fire from the centre
of the earth
shall cause earthquakes around the New City.
Two lords shall long wage a fruitless war,
Then Arethusa [the nymph of springs] shall redden a new river [of
lava].
I.88
[possibly after the life and death
of Julius Caesar]
The divine sickness [apoplexy]
shall surprise the great prince
a little before he shall have married a woman.
His support and credit shall suddenly become thin.
The Consul shall perish through the shaven head [priest?].
I.89
[after the contemporary wars between
France, England and the Spanish Netherlands]
All those from Lerida shall be by
the Moselle,
putting to death all those from the Loire and Seine:
seaborne aid shall approach under full sail
when the Spaniards shall open every vein.
I.90
[after the salt-tax revolt of 1548,
and the ominous birth of a deformed child at Sénas in 1554]
Bordeaux, Poitiers, at the sound of
the tocsin
with a great force shall go as far as Langon.
Their north wind shall be against the Gauls
when a hideous monster shall be born near Orgon.
I.91
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 44 BC]
The gods shall make it clear to
humans
that they [the gods?] shall be the authors of great conflict:
before the sky is seen to be calm, sword and lance [shall be wielded],
so that there shall be greater affliction to the left [north].
I.92
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
Under one [Great Monarch],
peace shall be everywhere proclaimed
but, not long [after], pillage and rebellion
started by town, land and sea through [his] rejection:
[of] dead and captives the third of a million.
I.93
[source unidentified, but with the
imagery presumably based on the Latin Epigrams of Ulrich von Hutten
(1488-1523]
The Italian land shall tremble near
the mountains,
Lion and Cock not too much in league:
in place of fear they shall help each other,
only Spain and the Celts moderate.
I.94
[after Diodorus Siculus’s Bibliotheca
historica (III, xiii, 17) – tr. Poggio 1515 – describing the Carthaginian
invasion of Selinus in Sicily in 409 BC]
At Port Selinus the tyrant put to
death,
liberty nevertheless not recovered:
[by] the new Mars, through vengeance and remorse,
the Lady honoured by the power of fear.
I.95
[possibly after the story of
Calvin’s successor in Geneva, Théodore de Bèze]
Before the monastery a twin child
found
of ancient and heroic blood by a monk:
his fame, renown and power through sect and tongue shall sound
such that people shall account the surviving premature twin well raised.
I.96
[after the activities of a
contemporary ‘sect-finder’]
He who shall have charge of
destroying
temples and sects [shall be] changed through fantasy:
he shall do more harm to rocks than to the living,
his ears seized by flowery speech.
I.97
[after current political and
military activities, particularly those of Michel de l’Hospital]
What fire and sword did not manage
to accomplish,
the smooth tongue in council shall achieve:
through rest and dreams he shall cause the King to imagine
the enemy still under fire and more soldiers’ blood shed.
I.98
[source unidentified]
The chief who shall have led a
numberless throng
far from their own region, of foreign customs and tongue:
five thousand finished [shall have finished up] in Crete and Thessaly.
The chief, fleeing, saved in a naval warehouse.
I.99
[source unidentified]
The great monarch who shall make
company
with two kings [shall be] united by friendship:
oh, what a sigh shall the great company make,
children around Narbonne, what pity!
I.100
[after Suetonius’s The Twelve
Caesars (I.81), describing the omens surrounding Julius Caesar’s death]
For a long time shall be seen in the
sky a grey bird
near Dole and the land of Tuscany,
holding in its beak a green branch:
soon a great one shall die and the war shall end.
Century
2
II.1
[after Froissart’s Chroniques,
describing John of Gaunt’s rampage across France during 1373]
Towards Aquitaine by British attacks
on their own account great incursions.
Rains, frosts shall make the land hostile.
Through the salt-sea port [La Rochelle] he [they] shall carry out
mighty invasions.
II.2
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3, referring to dissensions within Islam]
The blue head shall inflict upon the
white head
as much evil as France has done them good:
dead on the sail-yard, the lord hanged from the branch,
when the King shall say how many should be seized by his own people.
II.3
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 44 BC]
Because of the sun’s heat upon the
sea
of the Black Sea the fishes [shall be] half cooked:
the inhabitants shall cut them up [for food]
when Rhodes and Genoa shall run out of provisions.
II.4
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
All the way from Monaco to near
Sicily
the whole coast shall remain desolated:
there shall be no suburb, city or town
that has not been pillaged and robbed by the Barbarians.
II.5
[after the release from prison in
1552 of the Baron de la Garde, Admiral of the Eastern Sea]
He who was shut up in fish [prison]
by sword and letter
shall come forth, who shall then make war.
He shall have his well-rowed fleet at sea,
appearing near the Italian shore.
II.6
[after the biblical story of Sodom
and Gomorrah (Gen. 18:16 to 19:29)]
Near the gates and within two cities
there shall be two scourges the like of which [was] never seen;
famine within, plague, people driven out at sword-point,
crying for help on great God immortal.
II.7
[after Livy’s History of Rome
(xli.21)]
Among many transported to the isles,
one shall be born with two teeth in his mouth:
they shall die of famine, the trees stripped bare.
For them a new King devises a new edict.
II.8
[after contemporary efforts at
Catholic reform]
[Of] temples consecrated in the original Roman manner
they shall reject the crude bases,
accepting their original human laws,
[and] expelling, though not entirely, the cults of the saints.
II.9
[after the activities of John
Calvin, seen as the Antichrist and assimilated to the predictions of the Mirabilis
Liber of 1522/3]
Nine years the sterile one shall
hold the realm in peace,
then he shall fall into such bloodthirstiness:
through him a great people without faith and law shall die;
killed by one far more good-natured.
II.10
[after contemporary omens
assimilated to the predictions of the Mirabilis Liber of 1522/3]
Before long everything shall be set
in order.
We can look forward to a very sinister century.
The state of whores and monks exchanged:
they shall find few prepared to retain their proper rank.
II.11
[possibly after Suetonius’s The
Twelve Caesars, ii.3, casting doubt on the origins of the Emperor Augustus]
The numbskull’s son and heir shall
attain,
promoted so much, to the realm of the mighty:
his harsh glory everyone shall fear,
but his children [shall be] thrown out of the kingdom.
II.12
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
Eyes closed, opened [only] to
antique fantasy,
the habit of the monks shall be put at naught:
the great monarch shall chastise their frenzy,
sacking the treasure of the temples before them [their eyes] .
II.13
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
The soulless corpse shall no longer
be tortured:
[On the] day of death it shall be born [again]:
The divine spirit shall make the soul blissful,
seeing the Word in its eternity.
II.14
[after the arrival of Pope Clement
VII and Catarina de’ Medici at Marseille in 1533]
At the Fort St-Jean, the guard shall
keep its eyes skinned:
they shall make out from afar her serene Highness.
She and her retinue shall enter the port.
War banished, power sovereign.
II.15
[after the death by drowning of the
young King Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia in 1526 following the battle of
Mohacs]
Shortly before the monarch is
killed,
[Fleeing to] Castor and Pollux [the twin cities of Buda and Pest]
by ship, a comet:
State funds exhausted by land and sea.
Pisa, Asti, Ferrara, Turin [shall be] forbidden territory.
II.16
[after the Annales Cassini
for 1194, recording the conquest of formerly Muslim Sicily by the Holy Roman
Emperor Henry VI]
Naples, Palermo, Sicily, Syracuse,
new tyrants [rulers], celestial lightning-fires [fireworks in the
sky].
Many from London [a seaborne force] [from] Ghent, Brussels and
Susa
shall put on great slaughter [games], a triumph, festivities.
II.17
[in part after Plutarch’s Parallel
Lives, describing the flight of the Consul Marius]
To the field of the temple of the
vestal virgin
not far from Elne and the Pyrenees mountains
the great one [having been] taken, he is hidden in the sack.
By the north wind rivers and cultivated vines frozen.
II.18
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 186 BC]
New, sudden, violent rain
shall suddenly halt two armies:
stones from the sky, fires, shall make the sea stony.
The sudden death of seven by land and sea.
II.19
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
Newcomers, a place built without
defence,
shall occupy lands until then uninhabitable:
meadows, houses, fields, towns they shall take at will.
Famine, plague, war, [then] extensive land to plough.
II.20
[after a procession of condemned
heretics on their way to the stake on 21 January 1535, watched by François I
and his sons]
‘Brothers’ and ‘sisters’ captured in
various places
shall find themselves passing before the Monarch:
watching them shall be his attentive sons,
unhappy to see the marks on chin, forehead and nose.
II.21
[after contemporary reports of
Mediterranean piracy]
The ambassador sent by biremes,
[shall be] repelled halfway by unknown ones:
to support him four triremes shall come.
[They shall be] bound in Euboea with ropes and chains.
II.22
[after an unidentified episode from
ancient Greek history]
The Boeotian force shall leave
Sparta,
assembling near the submerged isle:
the fleet shall furl its sails,
having called in aid the supreme voice of the world’s navel [the Delphic
Oracle].
II.23
[after Suetonius’s The Twelve
Caesars (I.25, 81, 82), describing the omens attending the assassination of
Julius Caesar]
[The] palace birds chased out by one bird
very soon afterwards the prince shall be warned:
although the enemy is repelled beyond the river,
outside [he shall be] seized, the arrow borne by a bird.
II.24
[after Poggius’s De Varietate
Fortunae of around 1430, contrasting the fates of King Sigismund of Hungary
and his opponent, the Sultan Bayezid I (also known as Bajazet), after the
battle of Nicopolis on the banks of the Danube in 1396]
[Like] wild beasts famished [they] shall cross the rivers:
The major battle shall be by the Hister [Danube].
He shall cause the great one to be dragged in an iron cage,
while the German shall be surveying the infant Rhine.
II.25
[source unidentified]
The foreign guard [girl]
shall betray the fortress,
[in the] hope and dream of a higher marriage:
The guard having been deceived, the fort is captured in the fray.
[On] Loire, Saône, Rhône, Garonne, deadly outrage.
II.26
[source unidentified]
Because of the favour that the city
shall show
to the lord who shall soon lose the battle,
having fled the ranks, by Po and Ticino he shall shed
blood: explosions, deaths, drowned, hacked apart.
II.27
[after a contemporary event
affecting a religious procession]
The Holy Monstrance shall be struck [by
lightning] from the sky,
such that it cannot proceed any further:
The secret of the revealer hushed up,
so that they may march over it and forwards.
II.28
[possibly after chapter 33 of part
two of Lichtenbeger’s Pronosticatio in the Mirabilis Liber of 1522/3]
The last-but-one of those called
Prophet
shall take Diana [Monday] for his day of rest:
He shall wander far with his frenzied mind,
and deliver a great people from tribute.
II.29
[after the campaigns of Attila the
Hun, probably as described in Jordanis’s De Reb. Geticis (or De
Origine Actibusque Getarum), published in Latin by Herwagen of Basel in
1531]
The Easterner shall come forth from
his seat,
to cross the Apennine mountains and see Gaul:
he shall press on through the region’s waters and snow[s]
and shall strike everyone with his rod.
II.30
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
One who the infernal gods of
Hannibal
shall cause to be reborn, [shall become] the terror of mankind:
never more horrors nor worse reports
than ever occurred shall come to the Romans through Babel.
II.31
[possibly after the Mirabilis
Liber of 1522/3, together with contemporary phenomena]
In Campania and Capua things shall
be such
that only fields covered by waters shall be seen.
Before and after it shall rain for a long time:
there shall be nothing green to be seen except the trees.
II.32
[after various contemporary
omen-reports, later described and illustrated by Lycosthenes (1557) – see
woodcut below]
Milk, blood, frogs shall flatten the
corn in Dalmatia.
Battle once given, plague near Trebula Balliensis [Treglia]:
great shall be the cry throughout Slavonia.
Then a monster shall be born near or within Ravenna.
Beside the torrent that descends
from Verona
where it winds its way into the Po,
a great watery disaster, and no less on the Garonne,
when those of Genoa shall march against their country.
II.34
[possibly after the murder by Cesare
Borgia of the Duke of Gandia in 1497]
The senseless anger of the furious
combat
shall cause brothers’ swords to flash at table.
They shall be parted, one dead, one wounded – and troubled:
the proud duel shall do harm in France.
II.35
[after the accidental burning alive
of traders staying at the Hôtel de la Tête d’Argent at Lyon during the November
fair of 1500]
In two lodgings by night fire shall
take hold,
many within suffocated and roasted:
next to two rivers it shall happen for sure.
Sun in Sagittarius and Capricorn: all shall be done to death.
II.36
[after the downfall of the tyrant
Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan, in 1500, after he had intercepted a letter to
Charles VIII of France from the religious firebrand Savonarola]
The letters of the great Prophet
shall be seized:
they shall come into the hands of the tyrant:
his enterprises shall be to deceive his king,
but his graft shall very soon trouble him.
II.37
[source unidentified]
Of that great number who shall be
sent
to relieve those besieged in the fort,
plague and famine shall devour them all,
apart from seventy who shall be felled.
II.38
[after the brief reconciliation
between King François I and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V during 1538-9]
Of condemned there shall be a great
number made
when the monarchs shall be reconciled,
But for one of them it shall be so inconvenient
that they shall hardly be allied [for long].
II.39
[after the collapse of the
Florentine Republic in 1494]
One year before the Italian
conflict,
Germans, Gauls, Spaniards [shall be in it] for fortune [gain]:
The schoolhouse [whorehouse] that’s the state shall fall,
where, apart from a few, they shall be choked to death.
II.40
[after the largely naval war of 1499
to 1503 between Venice and the Ottoman Turks]
Shortly afterwards, not [after]
a very long interval at all,
by sea and land a great tumult shall be raised.
Much greater shall the naval battle be:
violent explosions that shall intensify the attack.
II.41
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC]
The great star shall burn for seven
days:
cloud shall make two [extra] suns appear.
The great mastiff all night shall howl
when the great Pontifex shall change country.
II.42
[after Francesco Matarazzo’s Chronicles
of the City of Perugia 1492 - 1503, describing the fierce power struggle in
1495 between the Oddi and the reigning Baglioni]
Cock, dogs and cats shall be
satiated with blood
once they have found the tyrant dead from the wound –
and in the bed of another legs and arms broken –
who was not afraid to die a cruel death.
II.43
[after Julius Obsequens’s account of
the omens accompanying the assassination of Julius Caesar and the assumption of
power by Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus]
During the appearance of the bearded
star [comet]
the three great princes shall be made enemies:
[lightning-]strikes from the sky, earthly peace on edge,
Po, Tiber flooding, serpent washed up on the shore.
II.44
[source unidentified]
The Eagle, driven back around the
tents,
shall be chased away by other birds from the locality
when the noise of cymbals, trumpets and bells
shall restore the senses of the senseless lady.
II.45
[after contemporary reports of
androgynous births, not unlike those recorded by Julius Obsequens]
Too much the sky weeps [it rains].
The Androgyne [once] begotten,
near that area human blood [shall be] shed.
By [its] overdue death a great people re-created:
sooner or later comes the awaited relief.
II.46
[in part after Virgil’s Eclogues,
iv.4-7]
After great human trouble, a greater
prepares itself:
the Great Mover renews the ages.
Rain, blood, milk, famine, sword and plague:
in the sky fire seen, a long shooting star.
II.47
[source unidentified]
The enemy lord, long in mourning,
dies of poison,
the sovereigns subjugated by infinite [tiny] numbers.
It shall rain stones, people hidden under the fleece:
at the point of death they shall be falsely accused.
II.48
[after the anti-Protestant crusade
across the Lubéron of 1545]
What a great force shall pass the
mountains!
Saturn in Sagittarius, Mars retrograde in Pisces,
their venomous creed under cover of salmon [Psalms],
their leader hanged with parcel-cord.
II.49
[after the flight of the Knights of
St John to Malta in 1530]
The councillors of the first league
–
the conquerors having been diverted to Malta,
abandoning Rhodes, Byzantium as their territory –
shall lack a homeland as they flee from their pursuers.
II.50
[source unidentified]
When those of Hainaut, of Ghent and
of Brussels
shall see the siege laid before Langres,
behind their flanks there shall be cruel wars.
The ancient wound [plague] shall be worse than [for the] enemies.
II.51
[after the celebrated ‘Affair of the
Templars’ of 1307-14 in which 138 (i.e. six times 23) French Templars were
accused and in some cases tortured and burnt alive]
No blood of the just shall be spilt
in London,
[but] six times twenty-three shall be singed by anathemas.
The ancient lady shall fall from a high place:
of the same sect shall many be killed.
II.52
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3 and possibly reports of the great Constantinople earthquake of 1509]
During several nights the earth
shall tremble:
in the spring two shocks shall follow.
Corinth, Ephesus shall be overwhelmed by two seas:
war [shall be] stirred up by two [leaders] valiant in combat.
II.53
[after the plague epidemic that
ravaged Marseille and the rest of Provence in 1545]
The great plague of the maritime
city
shall not cease until the death shall be avenged
of the just blood, condemned for their pains without committing a crime,
[and until] the great lady [shall be] outraged by the pretence.
II.54
[possibly after the Mirabilis
Liber of 1522/3, plus Julius Obsequens’s On Omens for 163 BC]
Through alien folk, and far from the
Romans,
their great city by the water [Rome] deeply troubled:
a girl without hands: his authority too much opposed,
the leader captured, the lock having not been properly adjusted.
II.55
[source unidentified]
In the conflict the lord who was
worth little
at his end shall do a wonderful thing:
while Adria [Venice] shall see what is lacking in him,
during the banquet the proud one stabbed.
II.56
[source unidentified]
What neither plague nor sword
managed to put a stop to,
dead in the well, thunderstruck from aloft the sky.
The abbot shall die when he shall see ruined
the shipwrecked ones trying to anchor on the reef.
II.57
[after the sack of Rome by the
forces of Charles V in 1527, following the collapse of the wall between the
Vatican and the Castel Sant’ Angelo]
Before the conflict the great wall
shall fall,
the lord [done] to death, death too sudden and lamented:
[one shall be] born imperfect, the greater part shall be inundated.
By the river the land stained with blood.
II.58
[source unidentified]
With neither foot nor hand, but with
sharp and strong tooth,
with a boss on the fort [forehead], born of the pig and woolly sheep [in
Milan],
near the gate treacherously he proceeds.
The moon shines, the little lord [is] abducted.
II.59
[after the contemporary exploits of
the Baron de la Garde, Admiral of the Eastern Mediterranean and one of
Nostradamus’s cronies]
[The] Gallic fleet with the support of the great Garde:
by the great Admiral and his trident soldiers
Provence laid waste to sustain his great horde.
More war at Narbonne, involving javelins and darts.
II.60
[after the breaking of the Ottomans’
agreement with France in 1554, and the apparently half-caste Baron de la
Garde’s consequent impatience, assimilated to a prophecy by the Sibylline
Oracle]
The African pact [bad faith]
in the East broken,
Ganges, Jordan, and Rhone, Loire, and Tagus shall change:
once the mulatto shall have had enough,
fleet scattered, blood and floating bodies.
II.61
[source unidentified]
Bravo! you of the Thames [you
English] in Gironde and La Rochelle:
O Trojan [Royal] blood! War at Port de la Flèche.
Behind the river the ladder put to the fort:
[by] arquebuses great slaughter over the breach.
II.62
[after the daylight comet of 1532,
the death of the Flemish painter Mabuse and the repulsing of the Ottoman
invaders in Hungary by the forces of Charles V]
Mabus[e] then shall soon die,
[and] then there shall come
of people and animals a horrible destruction.
Then suddenly vengeance shall be seen:
hundred, hand [human blood], thirst, hunger, when the comet shall pass.
II.63
[possibly after the War of Parma of
1551]
The Gauls [French] shall
subjugate Ausonia [Italy] very little:
Po, Marne and Seine [the Italians and French] shall engage in slaughter
at Parma.
He who shall prepare the great defence against them,
through the least on the wall, that lord shall lose his life.
II.64
[Nostradamus’s expectation of the
collapse of contemporary ‘heresies’ in Switzerland and southern France]
The people of Geneva shall wilt with
hunger, with thirst:
any hope of immediate help shall collapse.
On the point [of balance] shall tremble the law of the Cévennes:
no fleet can put in at the great port.
II.65
[after the Imperial campaign under
Charles de Bourbon that culminated in the sack of Rome in 1527]
The park inclined [The Crouching
Leopard] shall create great calamity
throughout Italy and in the area of Milan:
the ship [Church] aflame, plague and captivity.
Mercury in Sagittarius, Saturn shall reap.
II.66
[source unidentified]
Despite great dangers the captive
having escaped,
in a short time the lord’s fortune [shall be] changed [for the worse].
In the palace the populace is trapped.
By [way of a] good omen the city is besieged.
II.67
[possibly after an account of
political exile by Livy]
The blond one shall come to blows
with the one with a furrowed nose
by duel, and shall chase him out:
he shall have the exiles brought back,
[while] committing the strongest to places overseas.
II.68
[possibly anticipating the
restoration of the Stuarts in Scotland]
Of the North the efforts shall be
great:
on the Ocean the gate shall be opened.
The kingdom on the isle shall be restored:
London shall quake when the sail is noticed.
II.69
[after the struggles of François I
and his son Henri II with the Holy Roman Empire]
The Gallic King through the Celtic
right,
seeing the discord of the great Monarchy,
over the three parts [of Gaul] shall make his sceptre flourish,
against the cope of the great [Roman] Hierarchy.
II.70
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3 and Julius Obsequens’s On Omens]
The dart [The comet] shall
sprawl across the sky.
Deaths while speaking: great execution.
The stone in [Lightning strikes] the tree, the proud nation surrendered,
brutal human monster, purification and expiation.
II.71
[source unidentified]
The exiles shall come to Sicily
to deliver from hunger the foreign nation.
At daybreak the Celts shall fail it.
Life remains: the King sees reason.
II.72
[after the disastrous Battle of
Pavia of 1525, compared with Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon]
The Celtic army harassed in Italy,
on all sides conflict and great loss:
Romans fled, O Gaul repulsed!
By the Ticino, the battle of the Rubicon uncertain.
II.73
[after the struggles of Henri II
with the Holy Roman Empire, plus Julius Obsequens’s On Omens for 95 BC]
The shore of Lake Garda shall be
prisoner to Lake Fucino
from the Lake of Geneva to the port of L’Orguion:
[a child] born with three arms presages the image of a war
[waged by] three crowns on the great Endymion [moon-lover (Henri II)].
II.74
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
From Sens, from Autun they shall
come as far as the Rhone
to pass beyond towards the Pyrenees mountains.
The people shall emerge from the March of Ancona:
by land and sea they shall follow him in long files.
II.75
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 135 and 133 BC]
The voice heard of the unaccustomed
bird [the newly-invented office of sénéchal]
on the stern law-book and the winding stair [of the royal château at Blois]:
so high shall the [price of a] bushel of wheat rise,
that men shall become cannibals.
II.76
[after an unknown contemporary omen]
Lightning in Burgundy shall be a
portentous event,
that could never have been brought about artificially:
the sacristan of their senate, made lame,
shall make the affair known to the enemies.
II.77
[after the 13th-century Historia
Albigensis by Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay, describing the siege of Termes by
Count Simon de Montfort in 1210]
Repulsed by bows, flames, pitch and
by explosions:
screams, yells heard at midnight.
Within they are stationed on the broken ramparts,
the traitors having fled via underground tunnels.
II.78
[after the late arrival in 1554 of
the Baron de la Garde, the allegedly half-caste Admiral of the Eastern
Mediterranean, to support Strozzi against the Holy Roman Empire, and the
resulting devastation of Corsica and Sardinia by Andrea Doria]
The great Admiral from the depths of
the sea
of North African race and Gallic blood mixed,
The Isles bleeding because of the tardy rowing.
It shall harm him more than the badly hidden secret.
II.79
[after the Emperor Charles V’s
triumphant attack on Muslim Tunis in 1535, reapplied as a prophecy to the
French Henri II]
[He of] The black and frizzy beard skilfully
shall subjugate the cruel and haughty race:
The great CHYREN [Henry] shall remove from the dungeon
all those captured by the lunar banner [of the Muslims].
II.80
[source unidentified]
After the fight, through the
eloquence of the loser,
for a short time a slight respite is contrived,
[but] the lords are not allowed any deliverance:
the enemies are sent back to work.
II.81
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens, reapplied to the disaster at Milan of 1521]
Through fire from the sky the city
all but incinerated:
Aquarius threatens a new Deucalion [flood].
Sardinia [shall be] harassed by the North African galley,
after her Phaethon [the Sun] shall leave Libra.
II.82
[after an unidentified contemporary
omen]
Through hunger the prey shall take
the wolf prisoner,
the assailant then in extreme distress.
The newborn child having its behind in front,
the lord does not escape in the heart of the throng.
II.83
[source unidentified]
The great commerce of mighty Lyon
changed [for the worse],
the greater part returns to primitive ruin[s],
prey to the troops, the vines plundered.
Through the Jura mountains and Swabia, drizzle.
II.84
[possibly after the Mirabilis
Liber of 1522/3]
Between Campania, Siena, Florence,
Tuscany,
For six months and nine days it shall rain not a drop:
The foreign tongue in the land of Dalmatia,
it shall overrun, laying waste the whole land.
II.85
[in part after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens, plus Virgil’s Aeneid, viii.524-9]
The old full beard under the severe
edict
at Lyon beats the Celtic Eagle.
The minor lord perseveres too far:
the sound of arms in the sky: the Ligurian sea red.
II.86
[source unidentified]
A fleet shipwrecked near [in]
the Adriatic Sea:
The land quaking, it is cast ashore.
Egypt trembles at the rise of Islam.
The Herald is commissioned to cry surrender.
II.87
[possibly after the accession of the
Burgundian Charles V to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire in 1520]
Afterwards shall come from the
furthermost lands
a German Prince upon the gilded throne:
Servitude and waters [slavery] encountered.
The lady a vassal, her time no longer adored.
II.88
[source unidentified]
The lord’s progress having become
ruinous,
the seventh name shall be that of the fifth.
Greater by a third, the warlike foreigner
shall spare neither Paris nor Aix with his battering ram.
II.89
[source unidentified]
From the yoke shall be released the
two grand masters:
their great power shall see itself increased.
The new[ly re-leased] land shall be in his high hall
accounted for to the bloody one.
II.90
[after the celebrated Battle of
Mohács of 1526, when the twin cities of Buda and Pest were captured by
the Ottomans]
Through life and death the kingdom
of Hungary changed [for the worse]:
the [new] dispensation shall be harsher than servitude.
Their great city full of yells and screams,
Castor and Pollux [the twins] foes in the lists.
II.91
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 91 BC]
As the sun rises a great fire shall
be seen,
the noise and light extending towards the north:
within the circle deathly screams shall be heard,
by sword, fire, famine, death awaiting them.
II.92
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 91 BC]
Fire the colour of gold seen [falling]
from the sky to earth:
the firstborn struck from on high, a miraculous thing done.
Great human murder: the nephew of the lord captured:
deaths in the course of [public] spectacles, the haughty one escaped.
II.93
[after the sack of Rome in 1527]
Very close to the Tiber presses [the
goddess of] death
Shortly before a great flood.
The captain of the ship [of St Peter] captured, placed in the bilge:
Castle, palace in conflagration.
II.94
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3, with the imagery presumably based on the Latin Epigrams of
Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523)]
Great Po shall receive great evil
through the Gauls,
vain terror for the maritime Lion [Venice]:
a people numberless shall cross the sea,
a quarter of a million not escaping.
II.95
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
The inhabited places shall be
uninhabitable:
there shall be great disputes over fields,
kingdoms given over to cautious bunglers.
Then for brother-nobles death and dissension.
II.96
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 167, 137, 106, 100, 94, 92, 44 and/or 17 BC]
A burning torch shall be seen in the
evening sky
near the end and source of the Rhône.
Famine, sword: late the relief provided.
Persia returns to invade Macedonia.
II.97
[after the coronation of Pope
Clement V at Lyon in 1305]
Roman Pontiff, beware of approaching
the city that waters two rivers!
Your blood you shall cough up near there,
you and yours, when the rose shall bloom.
II.98
[after Livy’s History of Rome (xxi.63)
for 217 BC]
The one whose face is splattered
with the blood
of the next victim sacrificed –
Jupiter in Leo, an omen by way of a Presage –
shall be sent to be put to death then for the betrothed.
II.99
[in part after Livy’s History of
Rome (i.18), describing the inauguration of the semi-legendary King Numa in
around 710 BC]
The Roman territory that the omen
interpreted
shall be vexed by the Gallic people all too much:
but the Celtic nation shall fear the hour
[when] the fleet shall have been pushed too far by the north wind.
II.100
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
Within the isles so horrible a
tumult!
Nothing shall be heard but a clash of war.
So mighty shall be the attack of the predators
that everyone shall join in the [a] great league.
Century
3
III.1
[after the successful passage of the
Strait of Gibraltar by Nostradamus’s friend the Baron de la Garde, Admiral of
the Eastern Mediterranean, with 25 galleys in 1545, in the face of Imperial
forces bearing red crosses on their chests]
After combat and naval battle,
the great admiral at the height of his power it asleep:
red adversary shall become pale with fright,
putting the great ocean in dread.
III.2
[after the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation,
under Protestant attack in 1534]
The divine Word shall give to
substance,
including heaven, earth, gold hidden in the mystic fact:
body, soul, spirit having all power
as much under its feet as in the Holy See.
III.3
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3, Julius Obsequens’s On Omens and Livy’s History of Rome]
Mars and Mercury and the moon in
conjunction,
towards the south extreme drought:
in the depths of Asia it shall be said that the earth quakes,
Corinth, Ephesus then in perplexity.
II [abilis Liber of
1522/3]
When the failure of the heavenly
lights shall be close,
from one another not greatly distant,
cold, drought, danger towards the frontiers,
even where the oracle had its beginning.
III.5
[possibly after the Mirabilis
Liber of 1522/3]
Nearer or closer to the failure of
the two great luminaries
which shall happen between April and March,
oh, what prices! but two great good-natured ones
by land and sea shall succour all parts.
III.6
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 102 and/or 91 BC]
Within the closed temple the
lighting shall enter,
the citizens within their fortifications overcome,
Horses, cattle, men. Water shall reach the wall.
Worn out by famine, drought: thirst among the weakest.
III.7
[possibly after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 98 BC]
[Among] The fugitives, fire from the sky on the spear-points:
then, shortly, conflict of crows fighting.
From earth goes up the cry for aid and heavenly succour,
when near the walls shall be the combatants.
III.8
[after Plutarch’s Parallel Lives,
plus Julius Obsequens’s On Omens for 104 BC]
The Cimbri joined with their
neighbours
shall depopulate the bulk of Spain:
people gathered in Guienne and Limousin
shall be in league, and shall keep them company.
III.9
[source unidentified]
Bordeaux, Rouen and La Rochelle
joined together
shall hold firm around the great Ocean sea:
English, Bretons and Flemings in alliance
shall chase them as far as near Roanne.
III.10
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
Of blood and famine a seven-times-greater
calamity
is in preparation along the seashore
[and at] Monaco of hunger: place taken, captivity.
The Lord led by a hook in an iron cage.
III.11
[after a reported 1554 Swiss vision
of armies fighting in the sky, also described by Fincelius in his De miraculis
sui temporis of 1556]
The arms shall fight in the sky for
a long season,
the tree at the heart of the city fallen:
vermin gnawing, sword, a brand in the face,
then the monarch of Adria [Venice] worsted.
III.12
[presumably after the Mirabilis
Liber of 1522/3]
By the swollen Ebro, Po, Tagus,
Tiber and Rhone
and by the lake of Geneva and Arezzo,
the two great chiefs and cities of the Garonne
captured, dead, drowned. Human booty divided.
III.13
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 106 BC, as also Cardano’s On Subtlety of 1547]
Through lightning, in the chest gold
and silver melted:
of the two captives [beasts] one shall eat the other:
The city’s highest lord killed
when the fleet shall float underwater [sink beneath the waves].
III.14
[source unidentified]
Through the humble relative of the
valiant personage
of France, because of the wretched father,
honours, riches: suffering in his old age
for having believed the advice of an ignorant man.
III.15
[after contemporary worries about the
French succession]
In courage, vigour and glory the
kingdom shall change [for the worse],
on every side being opposed by its adversary:
then youth shall subjugate France [to others] through death [of the
King].
The great regent shall then be more contrary.
III.16
[possibly after the deeds of Henry
VIII of England and the contemporary problem of duelling]
The English prince [with]
Mars in his mid-heaven
Shall want to pursue his prosperous fortune.
Of the two duels [duellers] one shall pierce his [the other’s]
spleen:
Hated by him, adored by his mother.
III.17
[possibly after the Great Fire of
Rome of AD 64, assimilated to the solar eclipse of January 1544]
The Aventine hill shall be seen
burning at night:
The sky very suddenly dark in Flanders.
When the monarch shall chase his nephew/grandson away,
their Church officials shall commit scandals.
III.18
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 163, 130, 125, 124, 117, 111, 108, 106, 104, 95, and/or 92 BC]
After the fairly long rain of milk,
in several places the area of Reims affected.
Alas, what a bloody murder is in preparation near them!
Fathers and sons, [even] kings shall not dare to approach.
III.19
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens, as per previous verse]
In Lucca it shall rain blood and
milk
a little before a change of senior magistrate:
great plague and war, famine and drought shall be seen
far from where their prince and directing chief shall die.
III.20
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
Throughout the lands of the great
river Guadalquivir
far from the north of Spain, in the Kingdom of Grenada,
Crosses [Christians] beaten back by the Muslims.
One from Cordoba shall betray the land.
III.21
[possibly after Peucerus’s Teratoscopia
of 1553]
At Crustumerium by the Adriatic Sea
there shall appear a horrible fish
with human face and aquatic tail
that shall be caught without a hook.
III.22
[possibly after the Gesta
francorum et aliorum Hierosolymytanorum of around 1101, describing the
siege of Jerusalem during the First Crusade of 1099]
Six days the assault mounted against
the city:
battle shall be given, strong and bitter.
Three shall surrender it, and it shall be forgiven them:
the rest to the flames and to bloody slicing and dismemberment.
III.23
[after past French military
disasters in Italy under Louis XII, François I and Henri II]
If, France, you pass beyond the
Ligurian Sea,
you shall see yourself hemmed in on the islands and by sea,
the Muslims being against you: more so in the Adriatic Sea.
You shall gnaw the bones of horses and donkeys.
III.24
[sources as per the previous verse]
Great the confusion of the
enterprise,
loss of people, countless treasure[s]:
you must not extend your efforts further there.
France, pay attention to what I say.
III.25
[after contemporary dynastic
politics between 1516 and 1531]
He who shall attain to the Kingdom
of Navarre
when they shall be joined by Sicily and Naples
shall hold Bigorre and the Landes through Foix and Oloron
from one who shall be all too closely allied with Spain.
III.26
[after the well-known divinatory
practices of the classical world]
Of kings and princes they shall
raise images,
the augurs believed, the diviners promoted:
the victim’s horn gilded, and with azure and pearl.
The entrails shall be interpreted.
III.27
[after King François I’s creation of
a chair of Arabic at the Collège de France in the 1540s]
A Libyan prince powerful in the West
shall so impassion the French for Arabic
that he shall persuade literary scholars
to translate the Arabic language into French.
III.28
[after the remarkable reign of the
Byzantine empress Theodora (AD 527-548)]
Of land meagre and pedigree poor,
little by little and discreetly she shall advance in the realm.
Long shall a [the] young woman reign:
never did anyone so bad ever attain power.
III.29
[source unidentified]
The two nephews/grandson brought up
in separate places,
[in] a naval battle, [both] land and fathers fallen:
They shall reach so high in war
as to avenge the injury. Enemies defeated.
III.30
[after the assassination either of
the Duke of Parma in 1527 or of the Byzantine Emperor Nicephorus Phocas in AD
969]
He who in a swordfight in the midst
of war
shall have carried off the prize from one greater than he,
by night in bed shall six attack him:
naked and unarmoured, he shall suddenly be surprised.
III.31
[after the three famous battles
between the Romans and Parthians of 53 BC, 36 BC and 116 AD, taken as omens of
the anticipated defeat of Suleiman the Magnificent]
On the fields of Media, of Arabia
and Armenia
two great armies shall three times assemble:
near the banks of the Araxes, the household
of the great Suleiman shall fall to the ground [bite the dust].
III.32
[after the Italian campaigns of
Constable Anne de Montmorency, the notorious queller of the salt-tax revolt in
southwestern France, between 1536 and 1538]
The great burier of the people of
Aquitaine
shall make his way to the area of Tuscany,
when war shall reign near the area of Germany
and in the land of the Mantuan people.
III.33
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 104, 96, 93 and/or 53 BC]
In the city where the wolf shall
enter,
quite near there the enemies shall be:
an alien army shall lay waste a great country.
Allies shall cross the high walls of the Alps.
III.34
[after classical reports of solar
eclipses and deformed births, such as Julius Obsequens’s On Omens for
104 BC]
When the eclipse of the Sun shall
then be,
in full daylight the monster shall be seen:
quite otherwise [mistakenly] it shall be interpreted.
Inflation not guarded against: no-one shall have foreseen it.
III.35
[possibly after the doings of the
English astrologer and magician ‘Dr’ John Dee]
In the very depths of the West of
Europe
of poor folk a young child shall be born
who by his tongue shall seduce a great throng.
His fame shall grow and grow in the eastern kingdom.
III.36
[after the legendary circumstances
surrounding the death of the Franciscan theologian John Duns Scot in 1308]
Buried apoplectic, not dead,
he shall be found to have his hands eaten away
when the city shall condemn the heretic
who (it seemed to them) had changed [debased] their laws [b eliefs].
III.37
[after the campaigns of the Holy
Roman emperor Charles V in Italy]
Before the attack a speech
delivered,
Milan taken by the [Imperial] Eagle after being deceived by ambushes:
the ancient rampart demolished by cannons,
amidst fire and blood few granted mercy.
III.38
[source unidentified]
[Of] The Gallic race and a foreign nation
Beyond the mountains, [ many shall be] dead, captured and laid low:
in the opposite month [six months later] and near the time of the
grape-harvest
by the lords an agreement [shall be] drawn up.
III.39
[source unidentified]
The seven in three months [shall
be] in agreement
to subjugate the Apennine Alps:
but the tempest and the cowardly Ligurian
lays them low in sudden ruins.
III.40
[after contemporary efforts to
revive the ancient classical games in old, crumbling theatres]
The mighty theatre shall arise once
again,
the dais raised and the nets already stretched out.
Too much the first[-mentioned] shall weaken at the sound of the fanfare,
laid low by arches long since split apart.
III.41
[after the contemporary elevation to
power of the Protestant Louis de Bourbon, first Prince of Condé]
The hunchback shall be elected by
the council:
a more hideous monster on earth not [never] seen.
The flying blow shall put out the bishop’s eye:
the traitor to the King accepted as loyal.
III.42
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens, Livy’s History of Rome and an omen of 1544]
The child shall be born with two
teeth in its craw,
[hail]stones instead of rain shall fall in Tuscany:
a few years later there shall be neither wheat nor barley
to fill those who shall faint from hunger.
III.43
[after France’s huge losses in the
contemporary Italian wars]
People from around the Tarn, Lot and
Garonne
beware of crossing the Apennine mountains:
your tomb [shall be] near Rome and Ancona!
The black frizzy beard [Charles V] shall cause a monument to be erected.
III.44
[possibly after Julius Obsequens’s
tales of talking oxen in his On Omens, assimilated to the occasion in
1545 when lightning struck a gunpowder store at Mechlin]
When the animal to man domestic
after great efforts and jumps shall [manage to] speak,
the lightning to a virgin [nun] shall be so inimical
[that she shall be] snatched up from the ground and hung in the air.
III.45
[after the arrival in Toulouse of
five reforming monks in 1531]
The five strangers once entered into
the temple,
their blood shall soil the ground:
to the Toulousans it shall be a very hard example
of one who comes to abolish their laws.
III.46
[after the Lyon meteor of 1528,
taken as an omen of an imminent change of era]
The chart (of Plancus’ city )
presages to us
through clear signs and by fixed stars
that the age of its change is fast approaching,
neither for its good, nor for its ill.
III.47
[after the deposition of the
Byzantine Emperor John V Palaeologus and his son and Co-Emperor Manuel II in
1376, and their reinstatement three years later with the help of the Turks]
The old monarch chased out of his
kingdom
shall go to the East to seek its help.
For fear of the crosses [Christians] he shall lower his flag:
to Mitylene he shall go by way of a port and land [pied-à-terre].
III.48
[source unidentified]
Seven hundred captives roughly
staked out,
lots drawn for half to be murdered:
the nearby hope shall come so promptly,
but not soon enough [to prevent] the death of fifteen.
III.49
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
Gallic kingdom, you shall be much
changed:
to a foreign place is power transferred.
Other customs and laws shall be drawn up for you:
Rouen and Chartres shall do you much harm.
III.50
[after Savonarola’s Compendium
Revelationum and King Charles VIII of France’s attempted capture of
Florence during his Italian campaign of 1494]
The government of the great city
shall not wish to consent to the great austerity:
[by] the King summoned forth by a herald,
the ladder at the wall, the city shall repent.
III.51
[possibly after the suspected
poisoning in 1550 of Claude de Guise, Duke of Lorraine]
Paris conspires a great murder to
commit:
Blois shall cause it to be put into full effect.
Those of Orleans shall wish to replace their leader:
Angers, Troyes, Langres shall do them a great injury.
III.52
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3, possibly augmented by Livy’s History of Rome for BC, and with
the imagery presumably based on the Latin Epigrams of Ulrich von Hutten
(see woodcut)]
In Campania there shall be such
prolonged rain,
and in Apulia such great drought.
The Cock shall see the Eagle, its wing deformed:
by the Lion it shall be placed in extremity.
III.53
[the election at Frankfurt of
Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, in preference to France’s François I]
When the greater one shall carry off
the prize
of Nuremberg, of Augsburg, and those of Basle,
by Cologne’s leader Frankfurt [shall be] taken.
They shall cross through Flanders as far as into Gaul.
III.54
[after Froissart’s account in his Chroniques
of the European campaigns of Edward the Black Prince]
One of the greatest ones shall rush
to Spain,
which he shall thereafter come to bleed with a long wound,
pushing armies over the high mountains [the Pyrenees],
devastating all, and then he shall reign in peace.
III.55
[partly after the rise to power of
François de Lorraine, Second Duke of Guise – the quatrain claimed by
Nostradamus himself to have foretold the death of Henri II]
In the year that One Eye shall reign
in France,
the court shall be in a most vexatious ferment.
The lord of Blois shall kill his friend,
the realm placed in harm and double doubt.
III.56
[after the various ‘falling’ omens
that allegedly accompanied the death of King François I in 1547]
[At] Montauban, Nîmes, Avignon and Béziers
plague, thunder and hail [shall fall] at the end of March:
in Paris the bridge, [at] Lyon the wall, Montpellier.
From ’607, twenty-three parts [sects?].
III.57
[possibly after the violent deaths
of seven prominent British leaders between 1265 and 1555]
Seven times shall you see the
British nation change [its leader],
stained with blood for two hundred and ninety years –
but not France, through German support.
Aries [France] has worries about its Czech and Slovak flank [the
Ottomans].
III.58
[source unidentified]
Near the Rhine and the Norician Alps
shall be born a lord of people come too late,
who shall keep at bay the Sarmatians and Pannonians
such that nobody shall know what has become of him.
III.59
[possibly possibly after Plutarch’s Parallel
Lives (‘Artaxerxes’), describing the bloody struggles of succession that
occurred towards the end of the reign of Artaxerxes II (c. 359 BC)]
[The] Barbarian empire once usurped by the third,
the greater part of his relations he shall put to death:
through senile death the fourth struck by him,
for fear that the relations by the relations might be killed.
III.60
[apparently after a further,
unidentified incident from the history of the Ottomans]
Throughout all Asia great
proscription,
even in Mysia, Lycia and Pamphilia:
he shall shed blood by way of absolution
for a young Moor filled with felony.
III.61
[possibly after William of Tyre’s Historia
rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, 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]
The great band and sect of crusaders
shall draw itself up against Mesopotamia:
of the nearby river a light company
shall such a dispensation regard as hostile.
III.62
[apparently after the campaign of
Hannibal, as described in Livy’s History of Rome]
Near the Duero, with the Tyrrhenian
sea closed [to him],
He shall penetrate the lofty Pyrenees mountains:
having little time, and his advance cunningly explained,
he shall lead his forces to Carcassonne.
III.63
[partly after the Mirabilis Liber
of 1522/3]
The Roman power shall be totally
overthrown:
its great neighbour [the Holy Roman Empire] shall follow in its wake.
Hidden civil hatreds and quarrels
shall put off the buffoons’ follies.
III.64
[apparently after the Mirabilis
Liber of 1522/3]
The leader from Persia shall load
great cargo hulks
(a trireme fleet against the Muslim folk)
with Parthians and Medians, and shall plunder the Cyclades.
he shall long rest in the great Ionian port.
III.65
[after Bandini’s Dell’obelisco de
Cesare Augusto of 1549, describing the claimed discovery of the tomb of
Augustus Caesar in 1521, the year when Pope Leo X, having allegedly been
poisoned, died after being bled into the very chalice in which votes were
collected at papal conclaves]
When the tomb of the great Roman is
found,
the next day a Pope shall be elected:
scarcely shall he be approved by the Senate
[than he shall be] poisoned, his blood in the sacred chalice.
III.66
[source unidentified, but line 3
borrowed from Virgil’s Aeneid (iv.696)]
The great Bailiff of Orleans put to
death
shall be, by one of [one dedicated to] blood-vengeance:
neither from death deserved shall he die, nor by fate,
[but] evil shall have taken him hand and foot.
III.67
[after the Anabaptists of southern
Germany, known as the ‘Moravian Brethren’, who took refuge in Moravia during
the 1530s]
A new sect of Philosophers,
scorning death, gold, honours and riches,
shall not be confined to the German mountains:
to follow them there shall be support and crowds.
III.68
[source unidentified]
Leaderless folk from Spain and Italy
dead, laid low within the Peninsula.
Their conduct betrayed by crass folly,
swimming in blood [shall be] every crossroads.
III.69
[source unidentified, apart from
line 3, which is based on Andrea Alciato’s Emblamata of 1531]
The mighty army led by a young man,
shall surrender into the hands of the enemies:
but the old man born in the half-pig [Milan],
shall cause Chalon and Macon to be friends.
III.70
[source unidentified]
Great Britain including England
shall be flooded with such deep waters:
the new League of Ausonia [Italy] shall make war,
such that that they shall ally against each other.
III.71
[possibly after the Mirabilis
Liber of 1522/3]
Those in the isles long since
besieged
shall summon up strength and force against their enemies:
those outside, dead, prostrated by hunger,
shall be put in greater hunger than ever.
III.72
[source unidentified]
The good old man buried quite alive
near the great river, through false suspicion:
the new old man ennobled by riches.
Taken [seized] on the road [shall be] all the gold of the ransom.
III.73
[after Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (‘Agesilaus’)]
When into power the cripple shall
come,
for his competitor he shall have a closely-related bastard:
he and the kingdom shall become so very rotten
that, unless it recovers, it shall be too late.
III.74
[source unidentified]
Naples, Florence, Faenza and Imola
shall be on the point of such embarrassment
because, in order to delight the wretches of Nola,
[they shall have] complained of [their] having mocked its leader.
III.75
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
Pavia, Verona, Vicenza, Saragossa,
through swords from far away [their] lands bloodsoaked.
Such severe disease shall affect the fat [bean-]pods:
help at hand, but very far the remedies.
III.76
[after contemporary sects of German
Protestant Reformers]
In Germany shall arise various sects
very reminiscent of blissful paganism:
their heart captive and returns small,
they shall return to paying the true tithe.
III.77
[source unidentified]
[In the] The third climate [latitude] subject to Aries,
the year 1727, in October,
the King of Persia [shall be] captured by those of Egypt.
Conflict, death, loss: to the Cross a great disgrace.
III.78
[source unidentified]
The leader from Scotland, with six
from Germany,
captured by eastern sailors:
they shall cross Gibraltar and Spain,
as a present, fearful, to the new King in Persia.
III.79
[after the capture of Marseille by
Alphonso of Aragon in 1425, incorporating a phrase from the Attic Nights of
Aulus Gellius (vii.2.1-3)]
The chain of fate, everlastingly
ordained,
shall return in consecutive order.
The chain of Marseille shall be broken,
the city taken [by] the enemy at the same time.
III.80
[after the account by Foissart in
his Chroniques of the seizure of the throne of Castile by Henry the
Bastard from his half brother Don Pedro the Cruel, and his defeat by Edward the
Black Prince at the battle of Navarette in 1367]
The unworthy one chased out by the English
realm,
the councillor through anger burned alive:
his supporters shall stoop so low
that the Bastard shall be half accepted.
III.81
[possibly after the celebrated third
Roman slave-revolt of 73-71 BC under Spartacus]
The great loudmouth, shameless, audacious,
shall be chosen governor of the army:
[through] the boldness of his aggression
the bridge [shall be] broken, the City [Rome?] faint with fear.
III.82
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
Frejus, Antibes, towns around Nice
shall be devastated at sword-point by sea and by land:
locusts by land and sea, the wind [being] favourable.
Captives dead, bound: plunder outside the rules of war.
III.83
[after the ancient invasions of the
Vandals and Visigoths]
The long-haired ones of Celtic Gaul
accompanied by foreign peoples
shall take prisoner the people of Aquitaine
in order to subject them to massacres.
III.84
[after the sack of Rome by Imperial
forces in 1527]
The mighty City shall be completely
desolated:
of its inhabitants not one shall remain.
Wall, sects, temple and virgin [nun] violated,
by sword, fire, plague, cannon the people shall die.
III.85
[source unidentified]
The city [Narbonne] captured
through ruse and fraud,
trapped by means of a handsome youth:
assault mounted by the Robine near the Aude,
he and all dead because of a complete deception.
III.86
[after the life of St Louis of
Toulouse, sometime heir to the thrones of Naples and Sicily]
A leader from Ausonia [Italy]
shall go to Spain
by sea: he shall come to rest at Marseille.
Before his death he shall languish for a long time:
after his death a great miracle shall be seen.
III.87
[after the French expedition to
Corsica of 1553, which was blockaded and starved out by the Italian Admiral
Andrea Doria]
Gallic fleet, do not approach Corsica,
still less Sardinia, [or] you shall regret it:
every one of you shall die. Frustrated of succour, your snouts
shall swim in blood as captives. [But]You shall not believe me!
III.88
[after the invasion of Provence of
1524 by the renegade Constable Charles de Bourbon on behalf of the Emperor
Charles V]
From Barcelona by sea [shall
come] such a great army:
all Marseille shall quake with fear.
The Isles seized, help shut off by sea,
your betrayer shall sail overland [by canal and/or river].
III.89
[possibly after the Mirabilis
Liber 1522/3]
At that time Cyprus shall be
frustrated
of its relief by those of the Aegean Sea.
Old people killed: but by males depraved
their King seduced, [the] Queen more outraged.
III.90
[after the wild animals sent as gifts
to François I via the Ottoman pirate Barbarossa in 1533 by Suleiman the
Magnificent, then campaigning in Carmania (Persia), prior to the Ottoman
fleet’s agreed occupation of Marseille against the Holy Roman Empire]
The great Satyr [Ape] and
Tiger from Hyrcania,
as a gift [shall be] presented to those of the Ocean:
a naval chief shall set out from Carmania
who shall take [the] land from the ruler of Marseille.
III.91
[after Suetonius’s The Twelve
Caesars (Augustus: 92)]
The tree that, dead for a long time,
had withered
in one night shall become green again.
The King long ill, the prince’s foot is freed:
feared by foes, he shall make his sail resound.
III.92
[partly after Richard Roussat’s Livre
de l’estat et mutations des temps of 1549/50]
The world close to the [its]
final period,
Saturn shall be back again late:
power [having been] transferred to the Alpine nation,
the eye [shall be] plucked out at Narbonne by the Goshawk.
III.93
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
In Avignon all the lords of the Empire
shall come to rest because of Paris being desolated.
Tricastin shall resist the Hannibalic ire:
Lyon shall be poorly consoled by the change.
III.94
[probably an original Nostradamian
prediction]
After five hundred years, more
account shall be taken of him
who was the adornment of his time:
then suddenly great light shall he give
which at that time shall make them most satisfied.
III.95
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
The Moorish dispensation shall be
seen to fail
in favour of another much more seductive.
Dnieper shall be the first to fail:
through gifts and speech another [shall seem] more attractive.
III.96
[after an unidentified incident
dating astrologically from 1536]
The Chief of Fossano shall have his
throat cut
by the master of [his] bloodhound[s] and greyhound[s],
the deed instigated by those of the Tarpeian Rock [the justices],
Saturn in Leo, February 13.
III.97
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3 and Richard Roussat’s Livre de l’estat et mutations des temps of
1549/50]
A new dispensation shall occupy a
new land
towards Syria, Judea and Palestine:
the great barbarian [Arab] empire shall decay,
before Phoebe [the moon] completes her age [in 1887].
III.98
[source unidentified]
Two royal brothers shall wage war so
fiercely
that between them the war shall be so mortal
that each of them shall occupy strongholds:
over kingdom and life their great dispute shall be.
III.99
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
In the grassy fields of Alleins and
Vernègues
[and] of the Luberon by the Durance,
on the battlefield the conflict shall be so bitter on both sides
[that] Mesopotamia [Babylon] shall collapse in France.
III.100
[after Julius Caesar’s De bello
Gallico (Book VII), relating the victory of Vercingetorix at Gergovia in 52
BC]
Amongst the Gauls the last to be
honoured
over the man [who is his] enemy shall be victorious,
[dispositions of] forces and terrain assessed in a flash,
when from an arrow-shot the envious one shall die.
Century
4
IIII.1
[after the war of 1499 to 1503
between Venice and the Ottoman Turks]
This besides: for the remainder of
blood unshed
Venice demands that aid be given.
After waiting for a very long time,
the city yielded at the first trumpet blast.
IIII.2
[possibly Froissart’s Chroniques,
describing Edward the Black Prince’s 1367 expedition into Spain]
Through [the] death, from
France he shall undertake a journey.
Via a fleet at sea, he shall march over the Pyrenees Mountains.
Spain in turmoil, the troops shall march:
some of the greatest ladies abducted to France.
IIII.3
[possibly after Froissart, as per
the previous verse]
From Arras and Bourges [there
shall be] great hordes of Allobroges:
a greater number of Gascons shall fight on foot.
Those along the Rhône shall bleed Spain
near the mountain where Sagunto sits.
IIII.4
[after the frustration of the
Emperor Charles V when, in 1536, the French and Turks allied to attack him in
Italy and Savoy]
The impotent Prince angry, [there
shall be] complaints and disputes
at rapes and pillage by Cocks [French] and Africans [Turks?]:
a great is [host] by land, by sea innumerable sails.
Italy [once] secure, the Celts [French] shall be in pursuit.
IIII.5
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
Christians [at] peace, under
One [Monarch] the divine word fulfilled,
Spain and Gaul shall be united together.
Great disaster at hand, and combat very bitter:
no heart there shall be that is so bold as not to quake.
IIII.6
[source unidentified]
By those newly clad after the
discovery is made,
a malicious plot and machination:
the first to die shall be the one who uncovers it,
tainted with Venetian guile.
IIII.7
[after Froissart’s Chroniques
and other documents describing the life and times of John of Gaunt (1340-99)
and his family]
The lesser son of the great and hated
Prince
of leprosy shall have a great attack at the age of twenty:
from grief his mother shall die very sad and emaciated,
and he shall die [be buried?] where the cowardly leader falls [where
Thom. Becket was hacked to death].
IIII.8
[source unidentified]
The great city by prompt and sudden
assault
[shall be] surprised at night, the guards intercepted:
during the vigil and on the eve of Saint-Quentin
the guards slaughtered and the gates demolished.
IIII.9
[source unidentified]
The leader of the army in the middle
of the battle
by an arrow-shot shall be wounded in the thighs,
when Geneva, in tears and distress,
shall be betrayed by Lausanne and the German Swiss.
IIII.10
[possibly after the attempted coup
against Henry V of England just before his departure for Harfleur in 1415]
The young Prince falsely accused
shall throw the army into ferment and disputes:
the murder of the leader for his support
shall pacify the Sceptre [King]: then he shall cure scrofula.
IIII.11
[the appointment in 1493 by Pope Alexander
VI of his own possibly illegitimate son Cesare Borgia as a leading
administrator]
He who shall have the government of
the Great Cope [the Papacy]
shall be prevailed upon to commit some crime.
The twelve Red Ones [Cardinals] shall sully their cloth:
murder upon murder shall be perpetrated.
IIII.12
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
The greater army put shall flight in
disorder,
Scarcely further shall it be pursued:
the army reassembled and the legion reduced,
it shall then be chased out completely by the Gauls.
IIII.13
[source unidentified]
Of greater losses the news reported:
the report once made, the army shall be astonished.
The troops [once] united against [him] in revolt,
the double phalanx shall abandon the lord.
IIII.14
[source unidentified]
The sudden death of the first
personage
shall have brought about a change and put another in power,
sooner or later arriving so high at so young an age,
that by land and sea he shall be one to be feared.
IIII.15
[after an unidentified siege and
ruthless siege-breaker]
From where they shall think to make
famine come,
from there shall come replenishment.
The eye [King?/City?] of the sea through [sheer] canine greed
to one or the other shall give oil and wheat.
IIII.16
[after the then-recent history of La
Rochelle]
The Free City, become a servant of
liberty,
offers asylum to the downtrodden and dreamers [of better times].
The King, [his mind] changed, shall not be so hostile to them:
from a hundred they shall have become more than a thousand.
IIII.17
[after an unidentified local omen]
He shall change [route] via
Beaune, Nuits, Châlon and Dijon.
The duke, wishing to chastise the Barrois,
walking by the river, of a fish in a diver’s bleak
shall see the tail: the gate shall be shut.
IIII.18
[after an unidentified persecution
of astrologers]
Some of those most learned in
celestial facts
shall be reproved by ignorant princes,
punished by Edict, hounded like criminals,
and put to death wherever they shall be found.
IIII.19
[possibly after the Mirabilis
Liber of 1522/3]
Before Rouen the siege laid by the
Insubrians [troops from Milan],
by land and sea the passages closed off:
of Hainaut and Flanders, of Ghent and those of Liége
through the gifts of Bacchus [i.e. through drink] they shall ravage the
Borders.
IIII.20
[after the ancient necropolis at
nearby Arles known as les Alyscamps, and punning on its name]
Peace and plenty the place shall
long host:
throughout its empty realm lilies [shall grow].
Bodies of the dead by water and land shall be brought there,
vainly hoping for the chance to be buried there.
IIII.21
[possibly after the Mirabilis
Liber of 1522/3]
The change shall be most difficult,
[yet] city, province shall gain by the change.
Of high courage and wise, the bungler banished,
[by] sea and land people shall change their state.
IIII.22
[after the defeat of King François I
at the battle of Pavia in 1525]
The great host that shall be sent
away
all at once shall be needed by the King.
The word given shall be broken from afar:
he shall find himself exposed, in piteous disarray.
IIII.23
[source unidentified]
The legion in the fleet
shall burn lime, magnesium, sulphur and pitch:
[then] a long rest in the secure place.
Genoa [?] and Port’Ecole, fire shall consume them.
IIII.24
[after an unidentified aural apparition
in local mine-or quarry-workings]
Heard underground the faint voice of
the Holy Virgin –
‘The human flame shall be seen to shine as the divine’:
it shall cause the ground [of the monasteries] to be stained with monks’
blood,
and the holy temples to be destroyed by the impure.
IIII.25
[after contemporary alchemical
experiments]
Sublimated substances endlessly
visible to the eye
shall hide from view, for these reasons,
bodies, forehead included, headless and invisible,
diminishing the sacred prayers.
IIII.26
[quatrain in Provençal after Julius
Obsequens’s On Omens for 48 BC and/or Livy’s History of Rome (xxi.46)
for 218 BC]
The great swarm of bees shall arise,
such that nobody shall know whence they came.
By night an ambush. The watch [asleep] beneath the vines [through
drink],
city betrayed by five hidden babblers.
IIII.27
[after the so-called Antiques
just south of Nostradamus’s birthplace of Saint-Rémy, and Charlemagne’s nearby
defeat of the Saracens]
Salon, [St-Paul de] Mausole,
Tarascon, the arch of SEX.,
where the Pyramide still stands:
they shall deliver the Prince of Denmark –
a shameful ransom – at the temple of Artemis.
IIII.28
[the first of three quatrains with
an unidentified alchemical theme, possibly connected with some domestic incident]
When Venus [copper] shall be
covered by the sun [gold],
beneath the brightness shall be a hidden form.
Mercury shall have exposed them in the fire:
by the noise of war [through Mars = iron] it shall be put to the attack.
IIII.29
[another alchemical quatrain]
The sun [gold] hidden,
eclipsed by Mercury,
shall be placed only second in the firmament:
by Vulcan Hermes [Mercury] shall be foddered.
The sun [gold] shall be seen pure, glowing red and yellow.
IIII.30
[another alchemical quatrain,
possibly connected to contemporary fluctuations in the value of gold and
silver]
Eleven more times he shall not wish
the moon [silver] and sun [gold]
to be significantly raised or lowered in value,
and so little valued that little gold shall be spun.
After famine, plague, the secret shall be discovered.
IIII.31
[after Lucian’s famous The Death
of Peregrinus, probably as translated from the Greek into Latin as De
Morte Peregrini by Erasmus in 1502]
The moon in the depths of night on
the high mountain
the latter-day sage has single-mindedly seen:
by his disciples urged to be[come] immortal,
eyes southward, hands in lap, body aflame.
IIII.32
[after Froissart’s report in his Chroniques
of the incendiary speech of John Ball during the failed English Peasants’
Revolt of 1381]
Someplace, sometime meat shall give
way to fish:
Common Law shall be turned on its head.
The old one shall hold firm, then [the new one be] removed from the
midst,
‘everything shared among friends’ be abandoned.
IIII.33
[a final alchemical quatrain]
Jupiter [tin] conjoined more
with Venus [copper] than with the moon [silver],
appearing in white fullness:
Venus [copper] hidden under the whiteness of Neptune [water]
struck by the weighted branch of Mars [iron].
IIII.34
[after book VII of Commynes’ Mémoires,
describing the transfer in 1495 by Pope Alexander Borgia VI to Charles VIII of
France (here assimilated to the contemporary Henry II) of Prince Zimzim,
brother of the Turkish Sultan Bajazet]
The great one from the foreign land [shall
be] led captive,
chained in gold, presented to King CHYREN [Henri],
who in Ausonia [Italy] and Milan shall lose the war,
and all his host put to fire and sword.
IIII.35
[in part after Livy’s History of
Rome (xxii.1) and Julius Obsequens’s On Omens for 98 BC]
The fire extinguished, the virgins [nuns]
shall betray
the greater part of the new band.
Lightning to [strikes] sword, lance: the monks shall guard the King.
[In] Etruria and Corsica, by night throat[s] cut.
IIII.36
[source unidentified]
The Games once again set up again in
Gaul
after victory around Milan and in Campania:
[in the] mountains of Hesperia [Italy], the lords tied, trussed
up.
The Papal States and Spain shall tremble with fear.
IIII.37
[possibly after the Mirabilis
Liber of 1522/3]
The Gaul shall by leaps penetrate
the mountains:
he shall occupy the great city of Milan.
He shall make his host enter the [very] heart of it.
Genoa and Monaco shall repulse the red [bloody] Fleet.
IIII.38
[source unidentified]
While the duke shall distract the
King and Queen
the Byzantine chief [shall be held] captive in Samothrace.
Before the assault one shall eat the other [they shall be like cannibals].
Cantankerous, intractable, he shall follow the trail of blood.
IIII.39
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
The Rhodians shall request help,
through the neglect of its inheritors [having been] abandoned [left
to rack and ruin].
The Arab empire shall retrace its steps,
things [shall be] put right again by Hesperia [the West].
IIII.40
[source unidentified]
The fortresses of the besieged [shall
be] locked up,
by gunpowder reduced to ruins.
The traitors shall be sawn apart alive:
never did such a piteous schism [split] happen to the priesthood!
IIII.41
[after Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (Romulus,
29: Camilla, 33)]
[Of] female sex, held hostage,
she shall manage by night to deceive the guards.
The camp commandant, deceived by her language,
shall give in to her charms: it [the result] shall be piteous to see.
IIII.42
[source unidentified]
Geneva and Langres by those of Chartres
and Dôle
and by Grenoble [shall be taken] captive at Montélimar:
Seyssel, Lausanne, through fraudulent deceit,
shall betray them for sixty marks in gold.
IIII.43
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens, or an unknown contemporary omen-report]
Arms shall be heard clashing in the
sky:
that very same year the religious foes
shall endeavour unjustly to dispute the holy laws.
By dint of anathemas and war true believers [shall be] put to death.
IIII.44
[a further quatrain in Provençal,
after contemporary religious conflicts in southwestern France]
The lords of Mende, of Rodez and
Milhau
[shall inflict on] Cahors, Limoges, Castres a bad week:
the [there shall be a] night-raid by an apostate from Bordeaux
through Périgord as the tocsin sounds.
IIII.45
[after the battle of Pavia in 1525]
Through conflict a King shall
abandon the kingdom:
the greatest leader shall let him down in time of need.
Dead, ruined – few shall escape it,
all cut apart. There shall be one witness to it.
IIII.46
[probably after a manuscript copy of
Froissart’s celebrated Chroniques, detailing events during the Hundred
Years’ War (I, 158-167), and in particular those surrounding the Battle
of Poitiers of 1356]
Strong defences being your strongest
point,
beware, Tours, of your imminent ruin:
London and Nantes shall stake their claim to Reims.
Do not go any further while the mist persists.
IIII.47
[once again after Froissart’s Chroniques,
and the Black Prince’s bloody campaign of burning and looting across western France
leading to the Battle of Poitiers of 1356]
The savage Black One, when he shall
have tried
his bloody hand at fire, sword and drawn bows:
all the people shall be so terrified,
seeing their greatest lords hanged by neck and foot.
IIII.48
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 125 BC]
The fertile, spacious Ausonian [Italian]
plain
shall produce so many gadflies and locusts,
[that] the solar brightness shall become clouded over.
They shall eat everything, [and] great pestilence shall come from them.
IIII.49
[after the De pactiana
coniuratione commentarium by Angelo Poliziano of 1553, describing the
murder of the papally-connected Giuliano de’ Medici on April 26 1478 during
Easter Mass]
Before the people blood shall be
shed
which shall not be distant from highest heaven:
but for a long time this shall not be understood.
The mind of one only [Poliziano] shall bear witness to it.
IIII.50
[after Manilius’s Astronomica
(iv.773-5), in praise of the Emperor Augustus]
Libra shall see the West in power:
over heaven and earth it shall hold the monarchy.
No one shall see the forces of Asia Minor [Turkey] defeated
until seven in turn hold [have held] the hierarchy.
IIII.51
[source unidentified]
The duke, eager to pursue his enemy,
shall interfere and get in the way of his army:
they shall pursue those fleeing on foot so closely
that that day [there shall be] a conflict near Ganges [near
Montpellier].
IIII.52
[source unidentified]
[In] the besieged city men and women [shall be] on the
walls,
[with the] enemies outside, the chief ready to surrender.
The wind shall be [turn] strongly against the [enemy] troops:
they shall be driven away with quicklime, dust and ashes.
IIII.53
[source unidentified]
The fugitives and exiles recalled,
noble fathers and sons shall fortify the high places,
the cruel father and his men choked,
his son, even worse, thrown down the well.
IIII.54
[after the life of King François I]
Of a name that no Gallic [French]
King ever had,
never was there so fearful a thunderbolt,
Italy, Spain and the English quaking,
most attentive to foreign women.
IIII.55
[apparently after Suetonius’s The
Twelve Caesars, describing the omens accompanying the death of the Emperor
Domitian (xii.15, 23)]
When the crow attached to [sitting
on] the tower of brick
for seven hours shall do nothing but caw,
death foretold, the statue stained with blood,
the tyrant murdered. The people shall pray to the gods.
IIII.56
[source unidentified]
After the victory of the Rabid
Tongue,
the spirit [shall be] tempted by tranquillity and repose:
the bloody victor throughout the conflict gives speeches
[enough] to roast the tongue and the flesh and the bones.
IIII.57
[after Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars
on the Emperor Domitian (xii.1, 10)]
Ignorant envy [being]
encouraged by the great King,
he shall propose to ban the writings:
his wife (not his wife) tempted by another.
More than twice two [shall utter] neither sound nor screams.
IIII.58
[after the landing on the Italian
coast of the Turkish pirate Barbarossa in 1543 in search of water, when he
married the daughter of the governor of Gaeta]
The burning sun shall stick in the
throat,
the Etruscan land sprinkled with human blood:
the chief [with a] pail of water shall lead his son away,
the captive lady taken to Turkish territory.
IIII.59
[after the attack on Nice by the
Turkish pirate Barbarossa (then 80) in 1544]
Two [towns], besieged in
burning heat,
by thirst extinguished for a couple of cupfuls [of water]:
the fort stripped down by an old dreamer
shall show the Genevans the way to Nice.
IIII.60
[source unidentified]
The seven children [having been]
left behind as hostage,
the third shall slaughter his child:
two by his son shall be stabbed with a dagger.
Genoa, Florence he shall then transfix.
IIII.61
[possibly after the deposition from
power of High Constable Anne de Montmorency in 1541 in favour of the Guises of
Lorraine]
The old one [shall be] mocked
and deprived of his place
by the foreigner who shall suborn him:
his son’s hands eaten before his face,
the brother at Chartres shall betray Orléans, Rouen.
IIII.62
[after the baronial ambitions of
Gaspard de Coligny, appointed first Colonel General of the French Infantry in
the late 1540s and later a prominent Protestant]
A colonel with an ambitious plot
shall seize control of the greater army:
against his Prince [he shall create] a false invention,
and he [himself] shall be discovered beneath the whole tangle.
IIII.63
[after an unidentified military
campaign]
The Celtic army [shall move]
against the mountain folk
who shall be spotted and captured in the middle of a meal:
fresh people from the area shall soon repulse the grape-treaders,
all cut down by the edge of the sword.
IIII.64
[source unidentified]
The deserter in the garb of a
citizen
shall try the King for his offence:
[of] fifteen soldiers, for the most part outlaws,
a final life as head of his estate.
IIII.65
[source unidentified]
Against the deserter of the great
fortress,
after he shall have abandoned his post,
his adversary shall show such great prowess.
[By] the Emperor he shall soon be condemned to death.
IIII.66
[source unidentified]
Under the feigned colour [the
disguise] of seven shaven heads [monks]
various spies shall be scattered [sent forth],
wells and fountains sprinkled with poison.
At the fort[ress] of Genoa, devourers of men [cannibalism].
IIII.67
[after the various natural phenomena
of 1556 and François de Guise’s attack on Naples of May 1557]
[In] The year when Saturn and Mars are equally close to the sun,
the air very dry, a long-tailed meteor:
through secret fires a large area [shall be] burnt up by the heat.
Little rain, hot wind, wars, raids.
IIII.68
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
One year quite soon, not far from
Venus [Venice],
the two supreme lords of Asia Minor [Turkey] and of [North]
Africa,
from the Rhine and Lower Danube [i.e.. the borders of the Empire] shall
be said to have come [i.e. like the former ‘Barbarians at the gates’].
Screams, tears at Malta and on the Ligurian coast.
IIII.69
[source unidentified]
The exiles shall hold the great
city,
the citizens dead, murdered or expelled:
those of Aquileia shall promise Parma
to show them the way in via unmarked paths.
IIII.70
[possibly after Froissart’s account
in his Chroniques of Edward the Black Prince’s Spanish expedition of
1357]
Quite adjacent to the great Pyrenees
mountains,
one [man] shall raise a great army against the Eagle:
veins opened, forces wiped out,
such that as far as Pau he shall pursue the leader.
IIII.71
[source unidentified]
Instead of the wife the daughters [shall
be] slaughtered,
[yet] the foul murder she shall not survive:
in the well the virgins drowned,
the wife extinguished by a potion of aconite.
IIII.72
[source unidentified]
The Narbonnais through Agen and
Lectoure
at Saint-Félix shall hold their parliament:
those of Bazas shall promptly seize the worst moment
to seize Condom and Marsan.
IIII.73
[possibly after Suetonius’s Twelve
Caesars (Augustus, 45)]
The noble nephew by force shall put
to the proof
the pact made with a grudging heart:
Ferrara and Asti the leader shall try,
one evening when the pantomime is on.
IIII.74
[after contemporary religious
conflicts between northern Protestants and southern Catholics]
Those of lake Geneva and of Eure and
Sarthe
[shall be] all united against those of Aquitaine:
many Germans, even more Swiss.
They shall be defeated, along with those of Maine.
IIII.75
[after the defeat of King’s François
I at the battle of Pavia in 1525]
Ready to fight, there shall be a desertion:
the chief adversary shall gain the victory.
The rearguard shall put up a defence,
the injured [and] dead [left] in no-man’s-land.
IIII.76
[after contemporary religious
conflicts in southwestern France]
The people of Agen by those of
Périgord
shall be harried all the way to the Rhône:
a henchmen of the Gascons and Bigorre
shall betray the church, [even while] the priest is giving his sermon.
IIII.77
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3, applied to King Henri II]
Lunar the monarch, Italy at peace,
kingdoms united by the Christian King of the world:
dying, he shall want to lie in the soil of Blois,
after chasing the pirates from the sea.
IIII.78
[after the contemporary wars in
Italy]
The great army in the civil war
[shall be] found abroad around Parma by night:
seventy-nine murdered within the town,
the foreigners all put to the sword.
IIII.79
[after contemporary conflicts in
southwestern France]
Blood Royal, flee Monheurt, Mas,
Aiguillon!
The Landes shall be filled with Bordelais.
[In] Navarre, Bigorre, sword-points and spurs:
The deeply famished shall devour cork oak acorns.
IIII.80
[after contemporary battles in
southern France around Nîmes and the famous Pont du Gard aqueduct]
Near the great river by a great
conduit watering the land,
into fifteen parts shall the water be divided:
the city captured, fire, blood, screams, a conflict inflicted,
and most of them gathered together in the coliseum [amphitheatre].
IIII.81
[after the contemporary wars between
France and the Holy Roman Empire, notably around the river Scheldt]
A bridge shall at once be built of
pontoons
to carry across the army of the great Prince of Belgium:
in they shall fall, and not far from Brussels.
Of those who shall cross, seven shall be cut up with halberds.
IIII.82
[after the Mirabilis Liber of
1522/3]
A horde approaches, coming from
Slavonia:
the Old Destroyer the City shall ruin.
He shall see his Romania [Rome and its possessions] quite desolated,
then he shall not know how to put out the great flame.
IIII.83
[source unidentified]
[In] combat by night the valiant captain,
vanquished, shall flee: few people slaughtered.
His people stirred up, [there shall be] a serious sedition:
his own son shall hold him besieged.
IIII.84
[after the miserable death of Pierre
II de Courtenay, Count of Auxerre, while on his way to claim the throne of
Constantinople in 1217]
A noble of Auxerre shall die most
wretchedly,
driven out by those who had been under him,
bound in chains, and then [tethered] by a crude cable,
in the year when Mars, Venus and Sun are together in summer.
IIII.85
[after the events of 1546-7
involving the pestilence of Naples, the banning of Protestant heretics, the
withdrawal of the Dauphin Henri from court and the bequest to him by his father
of a camel, a lion and a panther acquired from Africa in 1533]
The white Plague shall be followed
by the black one,
one made prisoner shall be dragged in an execution-cart,
a Moorish camel on hobbled Feet.
Then the younger son shall hood the hawk.
IIII.86
[after the coronation of Charles
VIII of France in 1483]
The year when Saturn shall be in
conjunction in Aquarius
with the Sun, the most puissant King
shall be received and anointed at Reims and Aix.
After [his] conquests, he shall murder the innocent.
IIII.87
[source unidentified]
A King’s son, learned in so many
languages,
shall quarrel with his senior in the kingdom:
his father-in-law, commandeered by the elder son,
shall cause his main henchman to perish.
IIII.88
[after the demise, and death from
phtyriasis (lice) and gangrene in 1535, of Chancellor Antoine Duprat, Cardinal
Archbishop of Sens and papal legate, suspected in 1530 of having debased and
misappropriated gold from the huge ransom collected for the release of François
I from Spain]
Great Anthony, by that filthy thing
called
phtyriasis [lice] eaten up to his end,
one who would be covetous [even] of lead,
passing the port [Losing his post], shall be deposed from his appointed
position.
IIII.89
[apparently after the 11th-century Gesta
Cnutonis Regis, describing the accession to the English throne of King
Canute of Denmark in 1016 following the death of Edmund Ironside]
Thirty from London shall secretly
conspire
against their king, the enterprise [being] on the deck [by sea]:
he and his supporters shall taste death.
A blond king appointed, a native of Frisia.
IIII.90
[after accounts of an unidentified
contemporary siege in northern Italy]
The two armies shall be unable to
get to grips with each other on the walls,
[because] in that instant Milan and Pavia shall quake.
Hunger, thirst, doubt shall penetrate them so strongly,
[since] they shall have not a single scrap of meat, bread or provisions.
IIII.91
[source unidentified]
Of the Gallic [French] duke
compelled to fight a duel
the ship from Melilla shall not approach Monaco:
falsely accused, perpetual prison.
His son shall attempt to reign before his death.
IIII.92
[source unidentified]
The head cut off of the valiant
captain
shall be thrown at the feet of his adversary,
his body hanged from the yard-arm of the fleet.
Confused, it shall flee under oars against the wind.
IIII.93
[after Plutarch’s account in his Parallel
Lives (Alexander, 2) of an omen preceding the birth of Alexander the Great]
A serpent seen near the royal bed
shall be by the lady at night: the dogs shall not bark.
Then shall be born in France a prince so royal
that all princes shall regard him as heaven-sent.
IIII.94
[source unidentified, but with a
reference in the last line to the arrival in France of the Plague in 1347/8]
Two brother-nobles shall be chased
out of Spain,
the elder defeated under the Pyrenees mountains.
The sea shall redden, the Rhône, Lake Geneva bloody from Germany:
Narbonne, Béziers contaminated via Agde.
IIII.95
[an injudicious prophecy based on
the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s division of his empire between his son
Philip and his brother Ferdinand in 1555/6]
The kingdom left to two, they shall
hold it [only] very briefly:
after three years and seven months they shall be at war [with each other].
The two Vestals [The vassal leaders] shall rebel against them:
the elder shall be the victor in the land of Brittany.
IIII.96
[another injudicious prophecy based
on confused data, this time after contemporary English dynastic politics,
apparently referring to Queen Mary, Philip II of Spain and Mary’s half-brother
Edward]
The elder sister of the British Isle
fifteen years before her brother shall take her birth.
Through her fiancé, pending verification,
she shall succeed to the Kingdom of Libra [Spain].
IIII.97
[presumably a prophecy for the contemporary
John III of Portugal, born in 1502, who would in fact die in 1557 at the age of
55]
[In] the year when Mercury, Mars, Venus [shall be]
retrograde,
the line of the great Monarch shall not die out:
chosen by the Portuguese people near Cadiz,
he shall grow very old in peace and power.
IIII.98
[after unidentified contemporary
Italian regional squabbles]
Those of Alba shall make their way
into Rome,
in view of Langres flags flying at half-mast:
Marquis and Duke shall pardon no man.
Fire, blood, smallpox, no water, crops shall fail.
IIII.99
[after Froissart’s account in his Chroniques
of the victories of Edward the Black Prince, grandson of Edward I of England
and eldest son of the effeminate Edward II]
The valiant elder son of the King’s
‘daughter’
shall push back the Celts so far
that he shall send thunderbolts, so many and in such array,
near and far, then deep into Spain.
IIII.100
[after Julius Obsequens’s On
Omens for 163 BC, combined with Richard Roussat’s hint in his Livre de
l’estat et mutations des temps that the ‘Age of Mars’ allegedly just ended
(in 1533) might be repeated again in the future]
Fire [shall fall from] from
the sky on the Royal edifice
when the light of Mars shall fade:
seen months’ great war, the people dead through malignant acts.
Rouen, Evreux shall not fail the King.
Century
5
V.1
[source unidentified]
Before the advent of the Celts’
ruin,
within the church two [leaders] shall parley:
the one mounted on the charger [shall be] stabbed in the heart with a
dagger.
They shall bury the noble without making a clamour.
V.2
[source unidentified]
Seven conspirators at the banquet
shall cause to flash
the sword against the three outside the ship [whilst they are ashore]:
they shall place the noble in charge of one of the two fleets,
when for mere pence he shall be shot in the forehead.
V.3
[after the contemporary Burgundian
and French successions, in the form of the Emperor Charles V and Queen
Catherine de Médicis, with a sideways glance at the powerful pirate Barbarossa]
The successor to the duchy shall
come,
very far beyond [plus ultra – Charles V’s motto] the Tuscan sea.
The Gallic branch Florence shall hold
within its lap. The nautical frog [the Admiral] shall agree.
V.4
[after the expulsion from Rimini of
Pandolfo Malatesta, the tyrant who was known as the ‘Great Hound’, by Pope
Clement VII in 1528]
The great mastiff expelled from the
city
shall be angered by the foreign alliance.
After having hunted the stag in the fields
the Wolf and the Bear shall defy each other.
V.5
[after an unidentified episode from
contemporary politics, probably in Italy]
Under the shadowy pretence of
lifting servitude
he himself shall usurp people and city.
Worse he shall do because of the deceit of a young whore,
[and be] run out of town for false publicity.
V.6
[after Livy’s account in his History
of Rome (i.18) of the coronation of the semi-legendary King Numa in around
710 BC]
The augur shall place his hand on
the King’s head:
he shall pray for the peace of Italy.
To his left hand he shall [then] change the sceptre.
From King he shall become a peaceful Emperor.
V.7
[after contemporary excavations of
the ancient Gallo-Roman oppidum of Constantine, just south of Salon, as per a
recorded consultation with Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc]
Of the Triumvir shall the bones be
found
while searching for a deep, mysterious treasure:
those from thereabouts shall not feel easy
about excavating [the] marble and metallic lead.
V.8
[source unidentified]
The lately living shall be left, the
dead hidden
in heaps horrible and dreadful,
by night reduced to dust (the army blamed).
The city in flames shall support the enemy.
V.9
[source unidentified, involving an
omen]
The mighty prison [having been]
razed to the ground,
by the captive leader his friend [shall be] anticipated.
[A child] shall be born of a lady with hairy forehead and face:
then by a trick the Duke [shall be] caught by death.