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Overview
For the last 500 years the predictions of sixteenth-century physician and prophet Michel de Nostredame, better known as Nostradamus, have been endlessly interpreted. Scholars and skeptics have hotly debated whether the 946 "quatrains" he wrote foretold everything from the discovery of electricity to the birth of Adolph Hitler, the death of Princess Diana and the attack on the World Trade Center.
But while much has been written about Nostradamus's predictions and their validity, little is known of the man. This definitive biography by bestselling historian Ian Wilson reveals the man behind the legend for the first time. Tracing Nostradamus's life from his early years to his skillful treatment of Black Plague sufferers, his flight from agents of the Spanish Inquisition, and his career as an advisor to the king of France, Nostradamus separates fact from fiction and reveals a complex figure who, whether or not he could see future events, was indelibly marked by those of his own time.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466867376 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Ian Wilson is the author of the highly acclaimed bestsellers The Turin Shroud, The Blood and the Shroud, Jesus: The Evidence and Before the Flood. Wilson lives in Queensland, Australia.
Ian Wilson studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and is the author of many books, including the best-selling The Blood and the Shroud, Holy Faces, The Columbus Myth, and Shakespeare: The Evidence. He lives with his wife in Australia.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Jewish Forebears
For anyone with the tendency to let the mind wander across centuries, even millennia, Nostradamus' corner of the Rhône delta in sunlit southern Provence was a singularly appropriate place to be born. Six hundred years before the birth of Jesus it was already settled by Gauls, a Celtic people proficient in metalwork and chariotry thought to have originated from Turkey. In the wake of Alexander the Great's empire-building, Hellenistic Greeks arrived in the second century BC in their sleek, sail-assisted galleys. On exploring the environs of the craggy, pine-clad hills a few miles inland from the flat delta terrain they discovered a huge resource of excellent building stone. This they quarried to construct a most attractive small town, the remains of which, a mere five-minute stroll from Nostradamus' birthplace, are now recognised as France's oldest-known civilised buildings.
The Romans in their turn further developed what the Greeks had begun, renaming the town Glanum. After their departure the now Christianised and ever independent-minded Provençals opted to build their own separate township, St-Rémy-de-Provence. Their perennial usage of Glanum's dressed stone, their repeated discoveries of buried Roman artefacts, and the survival above ground of some of the larger Roman monuments ensured that the region's ancient past was not forgotten. By the turn of the Christian era's sixteenth century St-Rémy had grown into a stout-walled little town of perhaps a couple of thousand inhabitants. And according to the local folklore, it was in a modest-looking house on the western side of its narrow Rue de Viguier (today renamed Rue Hoche) that the infant Michel de Nostredame, later to style himself 'Nostradamus', was born on December 14, 1503.
What the St-Rémy Tourist Office insists is that same house, no. 6, still stands to this day, marked by a rather dingy post-Second World War marble plaque set above the doorway. Peter Lemesurier has sharply criticised his fellow Nostradamian John Hogue for illustrating the right street but the wrong house on the title-page of his lavishly illustrated Nostradamus: The New Revelations. However, since my wife and I managed to miss the plaque during our first stroll down the street, our sympathies lie somewhat with Hogue. Undeniably no. 6, which is not open to the public, today has a distinctly uninviting and unprepossessing appearance. However, as pointed out by St-Rémy's early twentieth-century local historian Henri Rolland, structural alterations carried out since Nostradamus' time have caused the edifice to lose 'all of its character and distinctiveness, its chimney, its sculptures and the tower which once topped it'.
As a year in which to be born, 1503 had a certain charm. Around the very same month that the infant Michel first sucked at his mother's breast the fifty-seven-year-old Christopher Columbus was crossing the Atlantic on his fourth and last voyage opening up the New World. The fifty-one-year-old Leonardo da Vinci was in Florence putting the finishing touches to his portrait of Mona Lisa. The twenty-eight-year-old Michelangelo was in the same city chipping away at his sculpture of David. The crusty, newly elected Pope Julius II, who would commission Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, was just finding his way around the Vatican in Rome. And at the University of Erfurt in Germany a self-opinionated twenty-year-old student called Martin Luther was studying for his law examinations.
On Nostradamus' parents and their ancestry, the world of Nostradamian studies stands deeply indebted to a dedicated St-Rémy physician, Dr Edgar Leroy, who died in 1965, for some exhaustive researches that have corrected many of the myths and misinformation promulgated by earlier Nostradamian 'authorities'. Ironically, not the least of this misinformation, sadly still peddled by many authors, was derived from members of the de Nostredame family themselves, whose penchant for social respectability could and sometimes did outweigh their concern for the truth.
The certain family facts are that Nostradamus' father was one Jaume (alternatively Jacques or James) de Nostredame, who made his living as a merchant, trading particularly in grain. Jaume seems to have enjoyed a comfortable enough living, no doubt because Frenchmen and women of the sixteenth century had every bit as much of a fondness for baguettes and other grain products as their modern-day descendants. Nostradamus' mother was named Reynière (or, in modern styling, Renée) de St-Rémy.
In English 'de Nostredame' means, of course, 'of Our Lady', the 'Lady' in question being the Virgin Mary. It is not exactly a typical French surname, and therefore of itself it provides an important clue to the family's chequered past. Quite definitely Jaume's and possibly even Reynière's parents ascended from Jewish forebears. In the sixteenth century these were disparagingly known as marrans or (in Spanish) marranos, from their having been forced to convert to Christianity at a time when western Europe's Jews were about as popular as their descendants became in Germany during Hitler's Third Reich.
Long before Michel de Nostredame's birth, anti-Semitism had become deeply entrenched throughout much of Europe. When the devastating plague known as the Black Death broke out in the mid-fourteenth century, France's Jewish population were accused by none other than the court poet Guillaume de Machaut of having caused the epidemic by poisoning the wells. Sometimes positively incited by their clergy, Christians committed terrible atrocities against Jews, among other things setting alight wooden houses in which they had trapped whole populations of men, women and children. Officially, Jews were banned altogether from France after 1394. Likewise in the Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Castile life was made as intolerable as possible for them. Just nine years before Nostradamus' birth Columbus' patrons Ferdinand and Isabella, under whom the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile became united, expelled them from their entire territory.
Thankfully for Nostradamus' immediate forebears, before 1480 Provence's inhabitants belonged neither to French nor to Spanish jurisdiction. Instead, from 1433 their ruler had been the humane and enlightened René of Anjou, an independent and popular monarch with a passion for painting, music, poetry and theatrical entertainment, who also encouraged commerce to flourish. Mindful, no doubt, that Jewish communities tended to be very good at oiling the wheels of commerce, in 1454 'good King René' issued an edict specifically allowing Provençal Jews to practise their religion free of all duress. This inevitably attracted otherwise displaced Jews into the region, with Avignon, the former papal seat just to the north of St-Rémy, receiving a particularly sizeable cluster.
All went well for these new communities up to King René's death, at the age of seventy-two in 1480. Then, by simple, peaceful inheritance, Provence passed into French crown tutelage; whereupon, within eight years, the French King Charles VIII (ironically known as the Affable) began insisting that all Jews, and particularly the large number that had taken up residence in Provence, should choose between converting to Christianity or having everything that they owned forcibly confiscated. Charles' successor Louis XII followed this up with a similar demand in 1501.
One of the Jewish families thus affected was that of the Gassonets of Avignon, whose head, Guy de Gassonet, saw no alternative other than opting for conversion. His wife Astrugue, however, proved more intransigent, and so the couple went their separate ways. Guy thereupon re-married, this time to a Christian, Blanche de Sainte-Marie. The union appears to have inspired him to signify his acceptance of Christianity more publicly by changing his surname to de Nostredame and his forename to Peyrot, that is, Pierre or Peter. 'Peyrot' and Blanche duly went on to have six children, one of whom was Jaume. So when Jaume expanded upon his father's business by setting up shop and home in nearby St-Rémy, he did so under the name of Jaume de Nostredame. This was how, by succession (and some adroit Latinisation), the world subsequently acquired its prophet named 'Nostradamus'.
In the case of Michel de Nostredame's mother Reynière she, unlike her Avignon husband, actually hailed from St-Rémy, evident not least from her surname. One of her forebears was particularly fondly remembered by her son later in life, his maternal great-grandfather Jean de Saint-Rémy, whose house in the rue du Viguier Jaume appears to have received as dowry, along with various other lands, vineyards and a tile-works. The elderly Jean would seem to have ceded the house to his grandson-in-law Jaume on the understanding that he would be allowed to live out his days there.
For visitors to Provence's Nostradamus Museum in Salon-de-Provence – the town south-east of St-Rémy where Nostradamus would spend the latter part of his life – the first scene in an attractively presented introductory sound-and-light show consists of a waxwork. The young Michel is represented as listening with rapt attention to words of wisdom being imparted to him by Jean de Saint-Rémy. Behind the pair is painted an attractive diorama of St-Rémy's surrounding countryside, dotted with its still extant Roman landmarks
Concerning Jean, certain fictions would later be generated by Michel's brother Jéhan, author of a Lives of the Most Ancient Provençal Poets (1575) upon which Nostradamus' son César later drew heavily for his History and Chronicle of Provence. These were corroborated by others of the time who might be expected to be knowledgeable. Incorrectly, he was supposed to have been a great nobleman of the court of King René, none other than the official court physician, and one of the popular monarch's chief officers. As Dr Leroy has exhaustively determined, the hard historical facts are rather different. Jean may well have been a physician. And as StRémy's clavaire, or Treasurer, for which there is also documentary evidence, he may even have attended King René when the latter made one of his periodic visits to St-Rémy, along with other towns in his realm. But as to Jean's having had any noble status, or any longterm attachment to the royal court, both may be firmly ruled out
This said, there is much to suggest, as the Nostradamus Museum's colourful waxwork so strongly implies, that Jean de Saint-Rémy played an important if not pivotal role in directing his young great-grandson's education. It is virtually certain that he was well versed in the astrology that Nostradamus would later pursue with such enthusiasm. In the fifteenth century Jean would almost automatically have been taught this as part of his medical training, and as such he may well have been the first to cast his great-grandson's horoscope.
For those with an interest in such matters, Nostradamus has been calculated by modern-day astrologers, using sixteenth-century methodology, to have been born with the Sun in Capricorn, and the three superior planets, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, all on the opposite side of the zodiac, in Cancer. Some corroboration of the accuracy of this derives from a later description by Nostradamus of the imprint that he had engraved on his signet ring: 'The Sun is represented at the top, and three planets at the bottom.' Amongst those with astrological knowledge this powerful conjunction of planets, together with other facets of the same horoscope, is said to indicate Nostradamus' star-driven inclination towards occultism and like interests. Recognising this, Jean may well have deliberately fostered this tendency in the boy, teaching him the art of creating a horoscope himself, at the same time encouraging a familiarity with the Bible and with the works of classical writers. Jean may also have ensured that Michel would receive the necessary grounding in the Latin language, and may overall have been responsible for much that would later become the quintessential Nostradamus.
Prime corroborative evidence for this is to be found in a letter which Nostradamus would write in 1561, when he was fifty-eight. In this he specifically told a correspondent that he could possibly improve on a particular horoscope by 'using a planisphere with another instrument which came to me from my maternal great-grandfather Jean de Saint-Rémy'. A planisphere is an instrument that, when set with a particular date and time, seemingly magically presents a two-dimensional map of the positions of the stars as these would have looked above the horizon at that moment. Though the ancient Greeks and Romans had planispheres, and the medieval Arabs and Persians followed them in this, such gadgetry was hardly one of the accoutrements to be expected in a normal sixteenth-century household. So Jean de Saint-Rémy's possession of both a planisphere and what was almost certainly an astrolabe (the 'other instrument' referred to by Nostradamus, basically a more advanced version of the planisphere), unmistakably indicates his serious interest in the stars, at a time, well over a century before the invention of the telescope, when astrology and astronomy were scarcely differentiated.
Additionally, the details of the sixteenth-century appearance of Jean's Rue Viguier house, given in Jaume de Nostredame's dowry document, specifically describe it as having one floor open to the sky. The topmost floor may well therefore have taken the form of the tower which can be seen in some early depictions of the house, but which, as pointed out by Henri Rolland, has long since disappeared. In an era centuries before street-lighting, such a top-floor 'observatory' would have provided Jean with an ideal vantage-point for his stargazing. We may well imagine that it was he who introduced such delights to the young Michel, duly going on to bequeath him his treasured planisphere and his astrolabe on recognising his natural interest in these matters. Further corroboration of this derives from a brief biography that was compiled after Nostradamus' death by the secretary whom he had employed during his later years, Jean Aimé de Chavigny. Though Chavigny's information cannot always be considered reliable, in his Brief Discourse he specifically described Nostradamus' maternal great-grandfather as having given the youngster his 'first taste of the Celestial Sciences'.
Again as suggested by Salon-de-Provence's Nostradamus Museum diorama, Jean de Saint-Rémy may also have been responsible for introducing his great-grandson to a quite different type of inspiration, the region's historic remains from the Roman era, some of which had never ceased to be visible. As earlier remarked, the former Roman town of Glanum lay less than a mile to the south of St-Rémy, and from this there had survived to Nostradamus' time, and still to this day, an imposing pair of Roman monuments known as 'Les Antiques'.
The first of these, long known locally as the 'Arc', is a Roman triumphal arch in the manner of London's Marble Arch, covered with relief sculptures that depict Julius Caesar's conquest of the former Greek colony of Gaul in 49 BC. The other monument, the 'Mausole', which stands only a few feet away and soars to over 19 metres high, consists of a two-storeyed mausoleum set on a square pedestal, its lower storey decorated with relief sculptures of scenes from the Trojan War, its upper storey replete with images of gods and sea-monsters.
If Nostradamus had strolled even a brief distance from St-Rémy with his great-grandfather he could hardly have missed these monuments, still evident to anyone approaching the town by road from Marseilles to this day. A positive confirmation that they were of considerably more than passing interest to young Michel is his clear reference to them amongst his later writings, dating from long after he had left St-Rémy.
Thus in a popular treatise that was published in 1555, when he had long become settled in Salon-de-Provence, Nostradamus pointedly spoke of the town of his childhood as 'Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, "called Sextrophea"'. This refers unmistakably to the fact that the 'Mausole', which in French is also called a trophée, bore a badly effaced Latin inscription of which the most legible letters are 'SEXT ...', leading to the local belief that it had once belonged to a Roman called Sextus.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Nostradamus"
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Copyright © 2007 Ian Wilson.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
TITLE PAGE,
COPYRIGHT NOTICE,
PICTURE CREDITS,
AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO 2002 EDITION,
ADDENDUM TO 2007 EDITION,
INTRODUCTION,
CHAPTER 1: Jewish Forebears,
CHAPTER 2: Fellow-Student of Rabelais,
CHAPTER 3: 'A Complete Atheist',
CHAPTER 4: Plagued Interlude,
CHAPTER 5: Almanac Entrepreneur,
CHAPTER 6: Prophecies on the Presses,
CHAPTER 7: A Tricky Invitation,
CHAPTER 8: Dealing in Futures,
CHAPTER 9: On Martial Field,
CHAPTER 10: Continent in Thrall,
CHAPTER 11: Seeking the Lost,
CHAPTER 12: A Satisfied Client,
CHAPTER 13: Royal Visitors,
CHAPTER 14: Matchmaker, Matchmaker,
CHAPTER 15: A Princely Horoscope,
CHAPTER 16: 'A Strange Migration',
CHAPTER 17: Gilding the Legend,
CHAPTER 18: Prophecies Fulfilled?,
CHAPTER 19: Plaything of Propagandists,
CHAPTER 20: His First 500 Years,
NOTES,
AUTHOR'S POSTSCRIPT,
INDEX,
ALSO BY IAN WILSON,
PRAISE FOR IAN WILSON,
COPYRIGHT,