Nostradamus and the Centuries: the Provençal physician and his quatrains
Michel de Nostredame, known as Nostradamus: the life of the physician of Salon, the editions of the Prophéties, the structure of the Centuries and their fame.
Few names are as closely associated with prophecy as that of Nostradamus, yet behind the legend lies a well-documented man of the Renaissance. Michel de Nostredame was born at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in December 1503 and died at Salon-de-Provence on 2 July 1566. He was a physician, a writer of almanacs and a compiler of cosmetic recipes and fruit preserves, and only in the last part of his life did he become famous for a book of obscure quatrains destined for extraordinary success.
The physician and the almanacs
After studying at the University of Montpellier, Nostredame practised medicine in various towns in the south of France, in years marked by repeated outbreaks of plague. He eventually settled in Salon, where he married for the second time and had many children. From the early 1550s he began publishing yearly almanacs with astrological forecasts, a very popular genre at the time, which brought him his first fame.
It was in this context that he adopted the Latinised form of his name, Nostradamus. The almanacs combined a calendar, weather indications and forecasts of the year's events, and made him known at court as well. In 1555 Queen Catherine de' Medici summoned him to Paris, and in 1564 the young King Charles IX, travelling through Provence, appointed him physician-in-ordinary to the king.
The Prophéties and the structure of the Centuries
The first edition of the Prophéties appeared in Lyon in 1555 from the printer Macé Bonhomme. It contained a preface addressed to his son César and 353 quatrains, grouped into three complete “centuries” and part of a fourth. The term century therefore does not mean a hundred years, as is often believed, but a group of one hundred quatrains. Later editions expanded the collection to ten centuries, for a total of about 940 quatrains.
The posthumous edition of 1568 brought the material together in a form later regarded as canonical, accompanied by a long dedicatory letter to King Henry II. The quatrains are in French, with frequent Latin words, anagrams, place names and mythological allusions. They follow no chronological order and rarely contain explicit dates, which makes them remarkably adaptable to interpretation.
The fortune of the quatrains
Nostradamus' fame grew after the death of Henry II, mortally wounded in a tournament in 1559. Some readers linked the event to quatrain 35 of the first century, which speaks of a young lion overcoming the old one in single combat. The connection was made after the fact, as later happened with a great many other quatrains applied to revolutions, wars and rulers.
Historians note that the Centuries are deeply shaped by the culture of their time: the wars of religion, fear of the Turks, astrology, apocalyptic readings of history. Many images derive from ancient sources and from earlier prophetic texts. Their vagueness allows correspondences to be found with almost any event, and it is precisely this quality that has kept them in circulation for nearly five centuries.
Over time countless editions have been published, often with added or altered quatrains, and the very name of Nostradamus has become a byword for popular prophecy. Looking at the historical man, the Provençal physician who wrote almanacs and frequented the Valois court, helps us understand the Centuries as a document of sixteenth-century France before seeing them as a riddle about the future.