Michel de Nostredame, usually Latinised as Nostradamus, was a French astrologer, physician and reputed seer, who is best known for his book Les Propheties, a collection of 942 poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events. The book was first published in 1555 and has rarely been out of print since his death.

  Nostradamus' family was originally Jewish, but had converted to Catholicism before he was born. He studied at the University of Avignon, but was forced to leave after just over a year when the university closed due to an outbreak of the plague. 
 He worked as an apothecary for several years before entering the University of Montpellier, hoping to earn a doctorate, but was almost immediately expelled after his work as an apothecary (a manual trade forbidden by university statutes) was discovered. He first married in 1531, but his wife and two children died in 1534 during another plague outbreak. He fought alongside doctors against the plague before remarrying to Anne Ponsarde, who bore him six children.

He wrote an almanac for 1550 and, as a result of its success, continued writing them for future years as he began working as an astrologer for various wealthy patrons. Catherine de' Medici became one of his foremost supporters. His Les Propheties, published in 1555, relied heavily on historical and literary precedent and initially received mixed reception. He suffered from severe gout toward the end of his life, which eventually developed in edema. He died on July 2, 1566. Many popular authors have retold apocryphal legends about his life.

  In the years since the publication of his Les Propheties, Nostradamus has attracted a large number of supporters, who, along with much of the popular press, credit him with having accurately predicted many major world events.

  Nostradamus was born on either the 14 or 21 of December 1503 in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Provence, France, where his claimed birthplace still exists, and baptized Michel. He was one of at least nine children of notary Jaume (or Jacques) de Nostredame and Reynière, granddaughter of Pierre de Saint-Rémy who worked as a physician in Saint-Rémy. Jaume's family had originally been Jewish, but his father, Cresquas, a grain and money dealer based in Avignon, had converted to Catholicism around 1459–1460, taking the Christian name "Pierre" and the surname "Nostredame" (Our Lady), the saint on whose day his conversion was solemnised. The earliest ancestor who can be identified on the paternal side is Astruge of Carcassonne, who died about 1420. Michel's known siblings included Delphine, Jean, Pierre, Hector, Louis, Bertrand, Jean II and Antoine. Little else is known about his childhood, although there is a persistent tradition that he was educated by his maternal great grandfather Jean de St. Rémy. A tradition which is somewhat undermined by the fact that the latter disappears from the historical record after 1504, when the child was only one year old.

    At the age of 14 Nostradamus entered the University of Avignon to study for his baccalaureate. After little more than a year, he was forced to leave Avignon when the university closed its doors during an outbreak of the plague. After leaving Avignon, Nostradamus, by his own account, traveled the countryside for eight years from 1521 researching herbal remedies. In 1529, after some years as an apothecary, he entered the University of Montpellier to study for a doctorate in medicine. He was expelled shortly afterwards by the student procurator, Guillaume Rondelet, when it was discovered that he had been an apothecary, a "manual trade" expressly banned by the university statutes, and had been slandering doctors. The expulsion document, still exists in the faculty library. However, some of his publishers and correspondents would later call him "Doctor". After his expulsion, Nostradamus continued working, presumably still as an apothecary, and became famous for creating a "rose pill" that purportedly protected against the plague.


(Nostradamus' claimed birthplace before its recent renovation, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence)


(Nostradamus' house at Salon-de-Provence, as reconstructed after the 1909 Provence earthquake)


  In 1531 Nostradamus was invited by Jules-César Scaliger, a leading Renaissance scholar, to come to Agen. There he married a woman of uncertain name (possibly Henriette d'Encausse), who bore him two children. In 1534 his wife and children died, presumably from the plague. After their deaths, he continued to travel, passing through France and possibly Italy.

  On his return in 1545, he assisted the prominent physician Louis Serre in his fight against a major plague outbreak in Marseille, and then tackled further outbreaks of disease on his own in Salon-de-Provence and in the regional capital, Aix-en-Provence. Finally, in 1547, he settled in Salon-de-Provence in the house which exists today, where he married a rich widow named Anne Ponsarde, with whom he had six children, three daughters and three sons. Between 1556 and 1567 he and his wife acquired a one thirteenth share in a huge canal project, organised by Adam de Craponne, to create the Canal de Craponne to irrigate the largely waterless Salon-de-Provence and the nearby Désert de la Crau from the river Durance.


  After another visit to Italy, Nostradamus began to move away from medicine and toward the "occult", although evidence suggests that he remained a Roman Catholic and was opposed to the Protestant Reformation. But it seems he could have dabbled in horoscopes, necromancy, scrying, and good luck charms such as the hawthorn rod. Following popular trends, he wrote an almanac for 1550, for the first time in print Latinising his name to Nostradamus. He was so encouraged by the almanac's success that he decided to write one or more annually. Taken together, they are known to have contained at least 6,338 prophecies, as well as at least eleven annual calendars, all of them starting on January 1 and not, as is sometimes supposed, in March.
  He then began his project of writing a book of one thousand mainly French quatrains, which constitute the largely undated prophecies for which he is most famous today. Feeling vulnerable to opposition on religious grounds, however, he devised a method of obscuring his meaning by using "Virgilianised" syntax, word games and a mixture of other languages such as Greek, Italian, Latin, and Provençal. For technical reasons connected with their publication in three installments, the last fifty-eight quatrains of the seventh "Century" have not survived in any extant edition.


  The quatrains, published in a book titled Les Propheties (The Prophecies), received a mixed reaction when they were published. Some people thought Nostradamus was a servant of evil, a fake, or insane, while many of the elite evidently thought otherwise. Catherine de' Medici, wife of King Henry II of France, was one of Nostradamus' greatest admirers. After reading his almanacs for 1555, which hinted at unnamed threats to the royal family, she summoned him to Paris to explain them and to draw up horoscopes for her children. At the time, he feared that he would be beheaded, but by the time of his death in 1566, Queen Catherine had made him Counselor and Physician to her son, the young King Charles IX of France.


  Some accounts of Nostradamus' life state that he was afraid of being persecuted for heresy by the Inquisition, but neither prophecy nor astrology fell in this bracket, and he would have been in danger only if he had practised magic to support them. In 1538 he came into conflict with the Church in Agen after an Inquisitor visited the area looking for anti-Catholic views. His brief imprisonment at Marignane in late 1561 was solely because he had violated a recent royal decree by publishing his 1562 almanac without the prior permission of a bishop.


(Nostradamus' current tomb in the Collégiale Saint-Laurent, Salon, into which his scattered remains were transferred after 1789)

  By 1566, Nostradamus' gout, which had plagued him painfully for many years and made movement very difficult, turned into edema, or dropsy. In late June he summoned his lawyer to draw up an extensive will bequeathing his property plus 3,444 crowns (around $300,000 US today), minus a few debts, to his wife pending her remarriage, in trust for her sons pending their twentyfifth birthdays and her daughters pending their marriages. This was followed by a much shorter codicil. On the evening of July 1, he is alleged to have told his secretary Jean de Chavigny, "You will not find me alive at sunrise." The next morning he was reportedly found dead, lying on the floor next to his bed. He was buried in the local Franciscan chapel in Salon, where his tomb remains to this day.

  In The Prophecies Nostradamus compiled his collection of major, long-term predictions. The first installment was published in 1555 and contained 353 quatrains. The third edition, with three hundred new quatrains, was reportedly printed in 1558, but now survives as only part of the omnibus edition that was published after his death in 1568. This version contains one unrhymed and 941 rhymed quatrains, grouped into nine sets of 100 and one of 42, called "Centuries".

  Given printing practices at the time which included type-setting from dictation, no two editions turned out to be identical, and it is relatively rare to find even two copies that are exactly the same. Certainly there is no warrant for assuming, that either the spellings or the punctuation of any edition are Nostradamus' originals.

  The Almanacs, by far the most popular of his works, were published annually from 1550 until his death. He often published two or three in a year, entitled either Almanachs (detailed predictions), Prognostications or Presages (more generalised predictions).

  Nostradamus was not only a diviner, but a professional healer. It is known that he wrote at least two books on medical science. One was an extremely free translation of The Protreptic of Galen, and in his so called Traité des fardemens (basically a medical cookbook containing, once again, materials borrowed mainly from others), he included a description of the methods he used to treat the plague, including bloodletting, none of which apparently worked. The same book also describes the preparation of cosmetics.

  Since his death, only the Prophecies have continued to be popular, but in this case they have been quite extraordinarily so. Over two hundred editions of them have appeared in that time, together with over 2,000 commentaries.

  Most of the quatrains deal with disasters, such as plagues, earthquakes, wars, floods, invasions, murders, droughts, and battles, all undated. Some quatrains cover these disasters in overall terms; others concern a single person or small group of people. Some cover a single town, others several towns in several countries. A major, underlying theme is an impending invasion of Europe by Muslim forces from farther east and south headed by the expected Antichrist, directly reflecting the then, current Ottoman invasions. All of this is presented in the context of the supposedly imminent end of the world, even though this is not in fact mentioned a conviction that sparked numerous collections of end-time prophecies at the time, including an unpublished collection by Christopher Columbus.

  Nostradamus' supporters have claimed that he predicted major world events, including the Great Fire of London, the French Revolution, the rises of Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the September 11 attacks, and the tenture of Donald Trump as the President of the United States.