49 Fun Facts About Nostradamus

What was Nostradamus's real name?

Michel de Nostredame. Scholars of his day liked to Latinise their names, though his brother Jean, a historian of Provence's troubadours, signed his own book in French.

A fake 'Nostradamus' verse, really written by a Canadian student in 1997, spread worldwide after which event?

The September 11 attacks. The student had invented the lines to show how vague wording can be made to fit any disaster, and emailers then passed them on as a genuine prediction.

What is the title of the 1555 book for which Nostradamus is best known?

Les Propheties. He meant it to hold a thousand verses, but it stopped 58 short, and it has been reprinted in hundreds of editions since his death.

Believers read 'Hister' in Nostradamus's verses as Hitler, but it was the Latin name of which river?

The Danube. Roman writers called its lower course the Ister or Hister, and one verse names it beside the Rhine, so the lines long sold as naming Hitler are about rivers.

What are the ten sections of Nostradamus's great book of verses called?

Centuries. Each was planned as a set of a hundred verses, so the name counts poems, not years, and the seventh was left well short of its hundred.

According to legend, Nostradamus knelt before a young friar in Italy who later became what?

Pope Sixtus V. The friar, Felice Peretti, was elected in 1585, but nothing written in Nostradamus's lifetime mentions the meeting, and scholars class it as a later invention.

Besides beauty treatments, what did Nostradamus teach readers to make in his 1555 recipe book?

Jams and jellies. The book that carried his plague remedy also taught readers to make cherry jam, quince jelly, marzipan and even a love potion.

What was the original religion of Nostradamus's father's family?

Judaism. His grandfather converted before he was born, so Nostradamus grew up a Catholic, though later legend made him an heir to the Israelite tribe of Issachar.

Why did Nostradamus have to break off his studies at Avignon after about a year?

Plague closed the university. He had got no further than grammar, rhetoric and logic, and by his own account he spent the next eight years roaming the countryside in search of herbal remedies.

Why was Nostradamus expelled from Montpellier's medical school in 1529?

He had worked as an apothecary. The school's statutes banned that 'manual trade', yet biographers long wrote that he had graduated there as a doctor of medicine.

Which remedy of his own invention made Nostradamus famous for supposedly warding off the plague?

A rose pill. He printed the recipe in 1555, but admitted in the same book that bleeding and the medicines of the day had done his plague patients no more good than nothing.

Which celebrated scholar's friendship drew Nostradamus to settle in Agen in the 1530s?

Jules-Cesar Scaliger. Nostradamus married and set up as a healer in Agen to be near him, but rivalry soured the friendship, and after his wife and two children died he took to the road again.

In which Provencal town did Nostradamus settle for good after marrying the rich widow Anne Ponsarde?

Salon-de-Provence. The marriage gave him the means to buy a comfortable house and write at leisure, and the house was later turned into a museum devoted to him.

Which of Nostradamus's publications were by far the most popular in his lifetime?

His almanacs. They sold so widely from 1550 that nobles from far beyond Provence began writing to him for horoscopes and advice.

Which queen of France invited Nostradamus to court and had him cast horoscopes for her children?

Catherine de' Medici. Three of the sons whose stars he read went on to reign as kings of France, and she remained his most powerful supporter for the rest of his life.

Which court post did Nostradamus hold in the last years of his life?

Physician-in-Ordinary to King Charles IX. He received it in 1564, when the teenage king and his mother toured Provence, so the famous seer's official post at court was a doctor's, with the rank of counsellor.

Which king's death after a jousting accident in 1559 was later said to match one of Nostradamus's quatrains?

Henry II. A lance splintered through his visor at a tournament and he died days later, yet the claim that a quatrain had foretold it first reached print 55 years afterwards.

What offence apparently led to Nostradamus's brief arrest in late 1561?

Publishing without a bishop's licence. A new royal decree required Church approval for almanacs, and the governor of Provence held him until he promised to write no more of them.

Which painful condition troubled Nostradamus for years before turning into the dropsy that killed him?

Gout. It left him barely able to move, and when the swelling set in he sent for his lawyer and dictated a long will days before he died.

What were Nostradamus's alleged parting words to his secretary?

'You will not find me alive at sunrise'. He was reportedly found dead beside his bed the next morning, and the secretary later reworded one of his old forecasts so that it described the scene.

During which upheaval was Nostradamus's body moved to the Collegiale Saint-Laurent?

The French Revolution. Revolutionaries broke open his tomb in a Franciscan church and scattered the bones, and the town's mayor had what could be saved moved to the new resting place.

What did Pepys hear had been found on Nostradamus's chest when his grave was opened?

A plate dating the exhumation. Pepys heard the tale at a dinner in 1667: the seer had made the town swear never to open his tomb, and the brass plate named the day and hour that they would.

Which 1522 compilation of older predictions was evidently one of Nostradamus's main sources?

The Mirabilis Liber. Its mostly Latin pages gathered older seers such as Savonarola, and Nostradamus's own preface borrows from him, probably by way of this book.

By his own account, why did Nostradamus word his predictions so obscurely?

He feared condemnation. His preface says rulers, sects and churches would reject what clashed with their wishes, so he chose 'dark and abstruse sayings', laced with Latin, Greek, Italian and Provençal.

Which video game series hid 'Nostradamus Enigma' riddles around the Paris of the 1790s?

Assassin's Creed. In Unity, players decode eighteen sets of cryptic verses, each named after a planet or a zodiac sign, to unlock a master assassin's armour.

Which Nazi leader had Nostradamus's verses reworked into leaflets promising a German victory in 1940?

Josef Goebbels. His propaganda ministry hired a Swiss astrologer to write them, a man who later fell from favour and died on his way to Buchenwald.

Which Hollywood legend hosted and narrated the 1981 Nostradamus film The Man Who Saw Tomorrow?

Orson Welles. The film leans on dramatised scenes, and during the 1991 Gulf War NBC recut it as a television special with Charlton Heston in the late Welles's place.

Which Hollywood studio released a string of short films on Nostradamus's predictions during the Second World War?

MGM. One reel earned an Oscar nomination in 1941, and after Mussolini fell the trade press crowed that the 1942 instalment had seen it coming.

Which veteran debunker took on the seer in the 1990 book The Mask of Nostradamus?

James Randi. A stage magician turned investigator of the paranormal, he argued that the seer's famous 'hits' were all matched to events after they happened, never before.

What comes from the sky in Nostradamus's 1999 quatrain?

A king, in the usual translation 'a great King of Terror'. The first printing has 'deffraieur', which some scholars read as a king who pays the bills rather than one who terrifies, and July 1999 passed without either.

Which city's great fire do believers say Nostradamus foretold in a verse about 'the blood of the just'?

London. The verse speaks of 'the blood of the just' and fire in 'twenty threes the six', read as 1666, and Pepys records dinner guests debating the claim within months of the blaze.

According to a popular legend, in what position was Nostradamus buried?

Standing upright. The story goes that he wanted nobody to walk over his grave, but his will asks for nothing of the kind and scholars count the tale among later inventions.

What do scholars fault most in English translations of Nostradamus's quatrains?

A weak grasp of Renaissance French. His language differs sharply from the modern tongue, and scholars say some translators went further and bent the wording to fit the events they had in mind.

Nostradamus left an unpublished translation of an ancient Greek treatise on which mysterious script?

Egyptian hieroglyphs. Like every scholar of his day he was working blind: the signs' true meanings stayed lost until Champollion deciphered them in the 19th century.

Into which project, built to water the dry plain around their home, did Nostradamus and his wife put money?

The Canal de Craponne. The engineer Adam de Craponne paid for much of it himself and raised the rest from partners and lenders, the seer among them.

In his 1555 preface, what did Nostradamus say he had done with the occult books he once owned?

Burned them. He wrote that he had 'presented them to Vulcan', and that the flames gave off a strange brightness that lit the house as if it were all on fire.

In which French city, then a great printing centre, were Nostradamus's quatrains first published in 1555?

Lyon. The printer Macé Bonhomme issued the first 353 quatrains there in May 1555, and the collection kept growing by instalments until the full edition appeared after its author's death.

Which group does Nostradamus warn to keep away in the Latin verse that closes one part of his book?

Astrologers. The verse lumps them with 'fools and barbarians' and curses anyone who ignores it, even though casting horoscopes was how he earned much of his living.

Nostradamus's references to a 'bronze tripod' liken his methods to those of which ancient oracle?

Apollo's shrine at Delphi. The priestess there spoke from a tripod, and his opening verse pictures him alone at night on a 'seat of brass', an image borrowed from old books rather than a record of his habits.

Which city in Provence paid Nostradamus a salary to fight its plague outbreak of 1546?

Aix. The city, known in full as Aix-en-Provence, kept him on its payroll for as long as the outbreak lasted, and the renown he won there brought calls for help from other stricken towns.

Who painted the best-known portrait of Nostradamus?

His son. César painted it around 1614, nearly fifty years after his father's death, so the face the world knows comes from a man who was twelve when Nostradamus died.

What does Nostredame, the family surname that Nostradamus Latinised, mean?

Our Lady. The Latin form handed a rival poet a famous jibe, 'Nostra damus cum falsa damus': when we hand out falsehoods, we are only giving what is ours.

In which Provençal town was Nostradamus born in December 1503?

Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The town marks a house as his birthplace with a plaque, and in 1889 its asylum sheltered Van Gogh while he painted The Starry Night.

Local legend says a man who broke into Nostradamus's tomb did what with the seer's skull?

Drank from it. The story, set during the sacking of his tomb, fed a belief that whoever drank from the skull would inherit his gift of prophecy.

According to a much-told story, a careless remark about what brought Nostradamus to the Inquisition's notice in 1538?

A church statue. Popular accounts have him flee abroad rather than face a hearing, though no document showing any such summons has been produced.

According to popular legend, Nostradamus saw his visions by gazing into what?

A bowl of water. The image comes from reading his opening verses literally; scholars find no evidence that he practised such rituals and think he worked chiefly from older books.

Which ancient physician's Protreptic did Nostradamus very freely translate?

Galen. The ancient doctor's teachings, bloodletting included, ruled the medicine of his day, yet Nostradamus admitted that bleeding had done his plague patients no good at all.

Which of Nostradamus's writings were published for the first time only in 1983?

His private letters. Together with rediscovered first editions, they showed that hardly any of the famous stories about him rested on evidence from his own lifetime.

Which heavy metal band released a double concept album about Nostradamus's life in 2008?

Judas Priest. Their manager, a veteran of the Who's rock opera Tommy, suggested the seer as a subject, and they answered with a first concept album that fills two discs.