50 free Nostradamus trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Nostradamus's real name?
Michel de Nostredame
He first Latinised it in print in his almanac for 1550.
Q 02In which country was Nostradamus born?
France
He was born in Saint-Remy-de-Provence in December 1503.
Q 03What is the title of the 1555 book of prophecies for which Nostradamus is best known?
Les Propheties
Its first instalment contained 353 quatrains.
Q 04How many poetic quatrains does the book of prophecies contain in its surviving form?
942
He planned a thousand, but the last 58 verses of the seventh Century were never printed.
Q 05A 'Century' in Nostradamus's book is a group of how many verses?
100
The name has nothing to do with periods of a hundred years, a common misunderstanding.
Q 06How many lines does a quatrain have?
Four
Nostradamus's were mainly in French, mixed with Greek, Latin, Italian and Provencal.
Q 07Which of these was NOT one of Nostradamus's professions?
Sculptor
He was also a reputed seer, and made money writing almanacs and horoscopes.
Q 08What was the original religion of Nostradamus's father's family?
Judaism
His grandfather Cresquas converted around 1459-60 and took a new surname honouring the Virgin.
Q 09Why did Nostradamus have to leave Avignon after just over a year of study?
The university closed during a plague outbreak
He had studied only the trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic by then.
Q 10Why was Nostradamus expelled from the University of Montpellier's medical school in 1529?
He had worked as an apothecary, a banned manual trade
He had also been slandering doctors; the expulsion document still exists in the faculty library.
Q 11What remedy made Nostradamus famous during his apothecary years, supposedly protecting against plague?
A rose pill
His medical cookbook also recommended bloodletting, none of which apparently worked.
Q 12Which Renaissance scholar invited Nostradamus to Agen in 1531?
Jules-Cesar Scaliger
He married there, but his wife and two children died in 1534, presumably of plague.
Q 13In which Provencal town did Nostradamus settle in 1547, marrying the rich widow Anne Ponsarde?
Salon-de-Provence
They had six children, three daughters and three sons, and the house still exists.
Q 21During which upheaval was Nostradamus's body moved to the Collegiale Saint-Laurent?
The French Revolution
He had first been buried in the Franciscan chapel in Salon, part of which is now a restaurant.
Q 22Per a legend Samuel Pepys recorded in 1667, what was found on Nostradamus's chest when his grave was opened?
A brass plaque giving the date of the exhumation
He had supposedly made the townsfolk swear his grave would never be disturbed.
Q 23Which 1522 compilation of prophecies was evidently one of Nostradamus's major sources?
Q 14Which of Nostradamus's publications were by far the most popular in his lifetime?
His almanacs
He published two or three a year from 1550 until his death, as Almanachs, Prognostications or Presages.
Q 15Which French queen summoned Nostradamus to Paris to explain hints of threats to the royal family?
Catherine de' Medici
She also had him draw up horoscopes for her children.
Q 16What position had the queen given Nostradamus by the time of his death in 1566?
Physician-in-Ordinary to King Charles IX
He had once feared he would be beheaded for his verses.
Q 17Which king's death in 1559 is said to have been foretold by quatrain I.35, a claim first printed in 1614?
Henry II
That is 55 years after the event, a typical example of the retrospective hit.
Q 18Why was Nostradamus briefly imprisoned at Marignane in 1561?
For publishing an almanac without a bishop's permission
A recent royal decree required prior clerical approval for such publications.
Q 19What condition, which plagued Nostradamus for years, turned into edema and killed him in 1566?
Gout
He was reportedly found dead on the floor beside his bed on 2 July.
Q 20What is Nostradamus alleged to have told his secretary on the evening before he died?
'You will not find me alive at sunrise'
The secretary, Jean de Chavigny, later edited a Presage to fit the way he died.
The Mirabilis Liber
His preface contains 24 biblical quotations, almost all in the order used by Savonarola.
Q 24Why did Nostradamus deliberately obscure the meaning of his verses with word games and mixed languages?
He felt vulnerable to opposition on religious grounds
He mixed Greek, Italian, Latin and Provencal into a Virgilianised syntax.
Q 25What underlying theme runs through the quatrains, reflecting the Ottoman invasions of his day?
A Muslim invasion of Europe led by the Antichrist
The same expectations appear in the earlier Mirabilis Liber.
Q 26Which Nazi minister had booklets of spurious Nostradamus verses airdropped over the Low Countries in 1940?
Josef Goebbels
His wife Magda had shown him a 1921 book by a German postal worker; the Allies dropped Nostradamus leaflets of their own.
Q 27Which Swiss astrologer did the Nazi propaganda ministry hire to write Nostradamus material?
Karl Ernst Krafft
He had supposedly used Nostradamus to predict an assassination attempt on Hitler in November 1939.
Q 28Which Hollywood studio made a series of short Nostradamus films to boost American morale in World War II?
MGM
They were part of the Allied response to German Nostradamus propaganda in the war.
Q 29Which sceptic coined 'retroactive clairvoyance' for how Nostradamus's words are fitted to past events?
James Randi
The technical term is postdiction.
Q 30Nostradamus's notorious '1999' prophecy is found in which quatrain?
X.72
Commentators have failed to match it to any event; Li Hongzhi claimed it foretold the Falun Gong persecution.