Nostradamus Trivia
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49 free Nostradamus trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Nostradamus trivia quiz covers the sixteenth-century apothecary from Provence whose book of rhyming riddles has been quoted after every disaster for four hundred years. The easy questions cover his real name, his country, the book he is famous for, the queen who adored him and the events his fans say he foresaw. From there the quiz moves through the documented life: the family that converted from Judaism, the plague that closed his first university, the expulsion from Montpellier for having been a shopkeeper, the rose pill, the almanacs, the summons to Paris and the appointment as physician to Charles IX. The hard end covers the details that surprise even fans: how many quatrains actually survive, the missing verses of Century VII, the Mirabilis Liber he mined for material, the languages he mixed to hide his meaning, the canal he invested in, the brief imprisonment over an unlicensed almanac, Goebbels and the Swiss astrologer, the Allied counter-leaflets, the Pepys legend of the brass plaque, the mistranslations that manufacture hits and the 1999 quatrain nobody has matched to anything. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry for Nostradamus before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Renaissance, French history and astrology quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Nostradamus's real name?
Michel de Nostredame
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.
Q 02A fake 'Nostradamus' verse, really written by a Canadian student in 1997, spread worldwide after which event?
The September 11 attacks
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.
Q 03What is the title of the 1555 book for which Nostradamus is best known?
Les Propheties
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.
Q 04Believers read 'Hister' in Nostradamus's verses as Hitler, but it was the Latin name of which river?
The Danube
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.
Q 05What are the ten sections of Nostradamus's great book of verses called?
Centuries
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.
Q 06According to legend, Nostradamus knelt before a young friar in Italy who later became what?
Pope Sixtus V
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.
Q 07Besides beauty treatments, what did Nostradamus teach readers to make in his 1555 recipe book?
Jams and jellies
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.
Q 08What was the original religion of Nostradamus's father's family?
Judaism
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.
Q 09Why did Nostradamus have to break off his studies at Avignon after about a year?
Plague closed the university
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.
Q 10Why was Nostradamus expelled from Montpellier's medical school in 1529?
He had worked as an apothecary
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.
Q 11Which remedy of his own invention made Nostradamus famous for supposedly warding off the plague?
A rose pill
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.
Q 12Which celebrated scholar's friendship drew Nostradamus to settle in Agen in the 1530s?
Jules-Cesar Scaliger
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.
Q 13In which Provencal town did Nostradamus settle for good after marrying the rich widow Anne Ponsarde?
Q 21During which upheaval was Nostradamus's body moved to the Collegiale Saint-Laurent?
The French Revolution
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.
Q 22What did Pepys hear had been found on Nostradamus's chest when his grave was opened?
A plate dating the exhumation
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.
Q 23Which 1522 compilation of older predictions was evidently one of Nostradamus's main sources?
Salon-de-Provence
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.
Q 14Which of Nostradamus's publications were by far the most popular in his lifetime?
His almanacs
His almanacs. They sold so widely from 1550 that nobles from far beyond Provence began writing to him for horoscopes and advice.
Q 15Which queen of France invited Nostradamus to court and had him cast horoscopes for her children?
Catherine de' Medici
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.
Q 16Which court post did Nostradamus hold in the last years of his life?
Physician-in-Ordinary to King Charles IX
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.
Q 17Which king's death after a jousting accident in 1559 was later said to match one of Nostradamus's quatrains?
Henry II
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.
Q 18What offence apparently led to Nostradamus's brief arrest in late 1561?
Publishing without a bishop's licence
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.
Q 19Which painful condition troubled Nostradamus for years before turning into the dropsy that killed him?
Gout
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.
Q 20What were Nostradamus's alleged parting words to his secretary?
'You will not find me alive at sunrise'
'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.
The Mirabilis Liber
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.
Q 24By his own account, why did Nostradamus word his predictions so obscurely?
He feared condemnation
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.
Q 25Which video game series hid 'Nostradamus Enigma' riddles around the Paris of the 1790s?
Assassin's Creed
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.
Q 26Which Nazi leader had Nostradamus's verses reworked into leaflets promising a German victory in 1940?
Josef Goebbels
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.
Q 27Which Hollywood legend hosted and narrated the 1981 Nostradamus film The Man Who Saw Tomorrow?
Orson Welles
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.
Q 28Which Hollywood studio released a string of short films on Nostradamus's predictions during the Second World War?
MGM
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.
Q 29Which veteran debunker took on the seer in the 1990 book The Mask of Nostradamus?
James Randi
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.
Q 30What comes from the sky in Nostradamus's 1999 quatrain?
A king
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.