The Real History of the End of the World (18 page)

8
Donald Weinstein, “The Savonarola Movement in Florence,” in
Millennial Dreams in Action,
ed. Sylvia L. Thrupp (New York: Schocken, 1970), 188.

9
Weinstein, 297.

10
Savonarola, trans. McGinn, 262-264. Savonarola's love of art and beauty is evident in the lush way he describes all the levels of heaven.

11
Lorenzo Polizzoto, “When Saints Fall Out: Women and the Savonarolan Reform in Early Sixteenth Century Florence,”
Renaissance Quarterly
46, no. 3 (1993).

12
John M. Najemy, “Machiavelli and the Medici, the Lessons of Florentine History,”
Renaissance Quarterly
35, no.4 (1982): 52-53. His later relations with the Medici family went downhill for a time. They imprisoned and tortured him, but later they made up.

13
Marcia Colish, “Republicanism, Religion and Machiavelli's Savonarolan Moment,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
60, no. 4 (1999): 613.

14
Lorenzo Polizzoto,
The Elect Nation: The Savonarola Movement in Florence 1494-1545
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992): 29.

15
Ibid., 87.

16
Ibid., 92. This debate would be at the heart of many of the Protestant movements just around the corner. It's possible that Martin Luther read some of the Latin polemics put out by the pro-Savonarola party.

17
Ibid., 95.

18
Patrick Macey, “The Lauda and the Cult of Savonarola,”
Renaissance Quarterly
45, no. 3 (1992), 440.

19
Donald Weinstein, “Hagiography, Demonology and Biography: Savonarola Studies Today,”
Journal of Modern History
, 63, no. 3 (1991), 484.

20
Ibid., 487.

The Antichrist will soon annihilate Troy,
His war of blood will last twenty-seven years,
The dead heretics, captives, exiles,
Blood, human corpses, reddened water, pockmarked earth.

—Nostradamus, Century V III, Quatrain 77
¹

 

 

 

 

T
he French Provençal doctor and astrologer, Michel de Nostredame, is far more famous today than he was in his lifetime. He was born December 14, 1503, in the village of St. Remy.
²
The sixteenth century was one, like our own, in which the patterns of society were being turned upside down. As Michel was growing up, the Protestant Reformation began; whole countries turned from belief in the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church; and a new populated continent was explored, destroying the geography that the Western world had believed in for millennia. It's not surprising that astrology and divination were practiced by thousands and trusted by most of society.

The family Nostredame is supposed to have been “new Christians,” recently converted from Judaism. However, it appears from records in Provence that only one of his grandfathers was a convert.
³
Peyrot de Nostredame was born Guy Gassonet, a Jew who moved to Avignon in the 1400s.
⁴
He was baptized and changed his name to Nostredame. He married a Christian woman named Blanche. Nostradamus made no secret of his grandfather's conversion, and apart from occasional slurs by critics, no one seems to have cared.

Peyrot and his son, Jaume, were not physicians, as Michel Nostradamus said in his autobiographical writing; they were grain merchants. Jaume moved from Avignon to the town of St. Remy, where he married Renée, the granddaughter of a doctor who was also a tax collector.
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Jaume became a notary in St. Remy and was well respected there. These were Michel's parents.

Provence had a number of Jewish families. Narbonne, on the edge of the Pyrenees, had had a large Jewish population since Roman times.
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However, while many commentators have assumed Nostradamus's connection to the Jewish community as fact and even tried to fit his prophecies into a kabbalistic tradition, it seems unlikely. For one reason, there is no evidence that Nostradamus read Hebrew, which is essential to any study of the Kabbalah. For another, both Michel's brother, Jehan, and Michel Nostradamus' son César were very strong Catholics. César repeated the myths of the blood libel and of Jews poisoning wells in his historical work.
⁷
I don't think that's the sort of thing a crypto-Jew in fear of being exposed would remind people of.

According to Nostradamus, he was most influenced in his astrological pursuits by his great-grandfather Jean de Saint-Rémy. Jean may have lived with his grandchildren. He turned his house over to Jaume with the condition that he be allowed to live in it until his death. Nostradamus wrote many years later that he was still using a planisphere left to him by his great-grandfather to help in casting horoscopes.
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In the early 1520s, Nostradamus is said to have traveled in France and Italy and, apparently, worked as a pharmacist. His first book was not a list of prophecies but one of recipes for medicines and herbal jams.
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In October 1529 Michel commenced the study of medicine at the University of Montpellier, the best in France for that discipline.
¹⁰
Around 1533, Michel wrote a letter to Julius Cesar Scaliger, a renowned physician, poet, and philosopher. Scaliger invited the young doctor to come stay with him at his home in Agen. Nostradamus moved to Agen, which is where he met and married his wife. He set up a medical practice and settled into a heady life of intellectual discussion with some of the greatest and rather radical scholars in the area.
¹¹

In 1538, the Inquisition came to Agen. Nostradamus was called before it but took the opportunity for a vacation in Bordeaux. No one bothered to go after him. They were really interested in Scaliger.
¹²

Several authors and talking heads have stated that Michel, as a crypto-Jew, lived in terror of the Inquisition. These opinions, often cited as fact, come from a desire on the part of Nostradamus believers to think that as someone of Jewish heritage he had some secret kabbalistic wisdom that helped him see the future. As I said earlier, it's not likely that he did. The other problem with this idea is that the people who are making these claims don't understand the primary concerns of the Church at that time. The Inquisition in sixteenth-century Provence wasn't that interested in Jews. There was a more immediate threat to their religion that was consuming them.

The inquisitor sent to Agen to see Scaliger and his friends was Louis de Rochette. Upon his arrival, Rochette gave a long sermon in which he encouraged the citizens to turn in any friends who might have been spouting heresy or reading banned books. Placards were also put up, but apparently torn down in the middle of the night by “a band of armed men, dressed in black.”
¹³
Still, there are always some people who love accusing their neighbors of crimes so, thanks to them, invitations were sent out by the Inquisition to many of the intelligentsia of Agen.

Scaliger and his circle were accused of reading books, not of magic and divination or Jewish mysticism, but those written by modern, subversive, radical authors. Among those listed were Calvin, Erasmus, Luther, and Zwingli. These were the men whose ideas had Catholics in an uproar. Nostradamus's friends were accused of denying that Purgatory existed and refusing to kneel for Communion but preferring to take the Host while standing, along with other heretical activities. Nostradamus and his friends were not suspected of being closet Jews but closet Protestants.
¹⁴
This is well documented and makes much more sense in the religious climate of the 1530s in France.

Scaliger was able to talk his way out of the charges, and when Nostradamus came back to Agen, everything had blown over. No one was waiting to arrest him.

It is at about this time that Nostradamus's wife and children died. He married when he was about twenty-four, but a few years later his wife and both his children died. It may have been from illness or accident. Some biographers have said that they died in a plague while Michel was traveling to treat others suffering from the same disease. However, they seem to be confusing that time with 1546, when he was living in Aix-en-Provence, working as a doctor for the city.
¹⁵

He left Agen, probably because it was too painful to live in a place full of memories. He always revered Scaliger, naming the eldest son of his second marriage after the doctor.

He went to Aix-en-Provence, where in 1546 he did heroic work during a recurrence of the Black Death. The city gave him a good pension for the work he had done treating plague victims, and it was only after he left Aix that he married again. His wife was named Anna, but her last name is given several different spellings. It may have been Ponce or Poncet. Neither is it certain how many children they had. One son, André, became a monk. Another, Charles, was a poet. The best known is his son César, who wrote a biography of his father and painted his portrait. There were at least three daughters, Madeleine, Anne, and Diane. The first two married well and had children. Diane remained unmarried. Several of the children lived well into their seventies, perhaps inheriting René's longevity genes.
¹⁶

In the late 1540s Nostradamus got the idea of publishing a yearly almanac that included astrological predictions, tips for when to plant, the phases of the moon, and what the weather would be like. The first one came out in 1550 and was a hit. He published an almanac every year after that. They contained many general prophecies.

Some time in the 1550s Nostradamus began to compose more complicated prophetic quatrains. He says that he burned the first ones for fear that world leaders would use them to grab power.
¹⁷
But he finally decided to publish them as a group in 1555. In his dedication to King Henri II of France, he mentions that he has figured March 14, 1557, as the start of the seventh millennium. Therefore, since the enemies of Christ and his church are about to be assailed, he feels that he must let his revelations be known in order to warn the world.
¹⁸

Nostradamus also wrote a long dedication/explanation/warning to his son César in which he rambles on quite a bit about prophecy not being for the unenlightened and how he hopes César will find a better profession than his since Nostradamus knows the gift of prophecy will not be passed on to his descendants. He reiterates that astrology is a serious study. He also tells his son that no one in the Church forbade him to publish, but he's going to make the predictions a little murky so that they can be understood only after the fact, just in case.

I should add that, by “tender brain” Michel didn't think César was stupid; the boy was only about five months old when this was written.

Nostradamus's book of prophecies, containing the first “century,” or one hundred quatrains, was even more popular than his almanacs. France was eager for predictions of the future, especially if they contained doom for England and the Protestant countries, which many of them did.

Intellectuals of the day didn't think much of the new prophet. Montaigne made fun of him. And his old mentor, Scaliger, wrote, “How can Nostradamus predict the future when he doesn't know what is going on at the present time?” and wondered why anyone would credit the “meaningless language of that impure idiot.”
²⁰
I think that's rather rough, but Scaliger wasn't known for his tact, and he probably suspected that Nostradamus was raking in the francs with his books.

Another early critic was fellow astrologer Pierre Vidal, who considered Nostradamus's technique sloppy and a disgrace to the profession.
²¹

However, his almanacs and book of prophecies were becoming more and more popular. Letters began to come in begging him to answer questions about the future as well as help find lost articles and buried treasure. The almanacs were translated into English and read at the court of Queen Elizabeth.
²²

He certainly caught the attention of the court of France. Queen Catherine de Medici, the wife of Henri II, was an avid consulter of seers as well as being adept at astrology in her own right.
²³
She was intrigued by Nostradamus's prophecies and extended an invitation to him to visit her court. Catherine already kept several astrologers on her payroll, the most famous being the three Ruggiari brothers, Bazile, Laurent, and Cosime, who supposedly predicted her marriage and children when she was still a young woman in Florence.
²⁴
Nostradamus was a nice addition to the group, although he stayed with the court only a short time. The patronage of the king and queen added to his fame, especially after a quatrain from the first book was taken to have predicted the death of King Henri in 1557 in a tournament (century I, quatrain 35). Of course, several other quatrains from the same century seem to predict victory and long life to the king, but those probably meant some other king.

He returned to his home, now in the town of Salon, and continued to produce prophecies. In 1563, the queen and her son visited Nostradamus, a singular honor. Nostradamus died in 1566. His prophecies are more popular now than ever. However, even before his death, there were books being printed by impostors who wrote their own prophecies, attributing them to Nostradamus. After he died, this became a torrent that continues to this day. In the mid-1600s, enemies of Cardinal Mazarin published a book of prophecies, many of which were actually by Nostradamus, but that included two forgeries foretelling the fall of the Cardinal.
²⁵