Quack Prophet

Tags:: confidence man,; faith,; foresight,; god or man?,; medival,; skepticism

The Italian-born queen of Henry II, Catherine’s superstitions were well-known throughout France; she usually had astrologers attending her or employed on her payroll, even though they were often wrong. She was not alone in her credulity, but credulity in one so powerful attracted its fair share of hucksters and charlatans—to the point where her third son Henry would later exclaim, exasperated, that he was tired of seeing his mother “cheated by false magicians who got a great deal of money out of her and didn’t do anything.” Nostradamus now joined this long list of seers, and dutifully visited to read the fortune of Catherine and Henry’s children, for which he was paid a modest fee of one hundred and thirty crowns (one hundred of which, he complained bitterly to a friend, was spent on the arduous trip to Paris itself).

At the time, his contemporaries were still more interested in the coming year than 1999 or 3797. But then came the unexpected. During a festival on June 30, 1559, Henry II took part in a jousting match, during which a freak accident occurred: his opponent, Gabriel Montgomery, broke his lance on Henry’s shield, and a sliver of the wood shot up under the king’s helmet and lodged above his eye in his brain. Henry bore it bravely, but lingered in agony for ten days before he died.

Now many at court, mourning and looking for answers, turned to the thirty-fifth quatrain in the first Century of the Prophecies:

The young lion will overcome the old
On the field of battle in single combat:
He put out his eyes in a cage of gold:
Two fleets one, then to die a cruel death.

Skeptics could protest that Montgomery may have been only six years younger than Henry—and not exactly “young”—or that Henry’s helmet was probably not made out of gold, or that the splinter in his brain did not actually enter his eye, or that no “fleets” of any kind were involved. But none of those arguments, then or now, mattered to those who—most notably Catherine herself—were convinced that Nostradamus had foreseen the king’s freakish demise.

In the wake of her husband’s death, Catherine began regularly consulting Nostradamus and his prophecies. She brought up his predictions in discussions with foreign ambassadors, and in 1564 brought her son, King Charles IX, to Salon to have his fortune read by the seer, who told the fourteen-year-old ruler he’d be “A great man in war, second to none in piety.”

His prophecies were not always so pandering. He told Catherine that all four of her sons would live to be king, which sounds good until one realizes that this means the first three were headed for early deaths. He went on to predict that one day her entire line would be extinct, the seeming accuracy of the forecast providing cold comfort when her favorite daughter Elizabeth died in childbirth a few years later. Indeed, when one tallies up Nostradamus’ predictions, he seems to have been most accurate when predicting calamity for his greatest patron. But Catherine’s life was always going to be one of constant violence and sudden destruction. If his quatrains could not stop all of this, at least she could take comfort in knowing that there was some larger order governing this chaos. Be it in the stars or in God, at least the deaths of her husband and children weren’t entirely arbitrary.

Nostradamus was a voice for his times. He spoke of wars, famines, dynasties falling, and the world ending, and after his death in 1566 from dropsy, his writings would continue to reappear in times of similar calamity. Theophilus de Garencières, his first English translator, published The Prophecies in London in 1672, just six years after much of the city had been destroyed, first by plague and then by fire. In those tumultuous times in England, Nostradamus’ work found a new life in assuaging Britons’ anxieties: when Charles II failed to produce a legitimate heir, a pamphlet appeared falsely claiming that Nostradamus had predicted the king would soon sire a son from his own body.

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It's interesting to see the difference between our modern conceptions (and those of Nostradamus') of prophecy and earlier ideas of the prophet, both biblical and medieval. Even up to the twelfth century, the prophet (like Hildegard of Bingen) was commonly perceived as the trumpet of God, through whom God revealed not just some facts of the future but the whole of Christian theology and salvation history. Thus, prophecy is God's message to His people, a message that can both comfort and reassure with the promises of redemption, and admonish and castigate with the thunder of reformation.

There seems to be a shift sometime around the end of the twelfth century from prophecy as the all-encompassing message of God to His people to prophecy as prediction of the future. The prophet's office, stripped of its deeper anagogical and moral claims, moves to the wild-eyed fringes. As theology is sliced and diced by the scholastic masters at university, the prophet's claim to theologian dwindles and soon evaporates.

For more on this shift in the perception of the prophet, see my blog: http://nathaniel-campbell.blogspot.com/2011/11/nostradamus-effect-prophecy-and-its.html

Posted by Nathaniel Campbell on Wed 2 Nov 2011
The last sentence of the first quatrain you quote reads

" Deux classes une, puis mourir, mort cruelle"

which translates

"Two wounds one, then die a cruel death"

nothing to do with "fleets". Please correct your error.

As for your interpretation of the other part translated, might I just note that a tilting helm does resemble a cage (as virtually every English school-boy knows as they are to be seen in most of our older museums) and Henri II's was in fact gilded ie would have appeared as a cage of gold. Oh, in case you do not know a tilting helm was what Henri II was wearing during his fateful combat with Montgomery.

Also, if you take the trouble to read contemporary reports you will learn that indeed Henri was struck through the eye (into the brain), and according to his physicians both "eyes" where put out. Certainly too, there were two wounds that with the inadequate treatment of those days became one big septic mass - Henri look 10 days to die.

Also, while we are here : I assume you mean Gabriel comte (count) of Montgomery. Who was in fact Gabriel de Lorges, not Gabriel Montgomery (quite another person), as you have mistakenly written.

At the time of the combat, Henri was 40 years old - in Medieval France that would qualify as "old". Montgomery was 29 - again which would qualify as "young". You will note that there was more than 6 years between them. Please correct that elementary mistake.

Might I suggest that you aquaint yourself with real authorities such as Histoire particuliere de la Cour de Henry II by de Chateauneauf (Secretary of state under Henri II) and other reliable works that you will not make such basic errors in the future.

Posted by Anthony D on Sat 5 Nov 2011
For someone who places Nostradamus in the "Quack Prophet" category, your research does not match that of people who have put much more time and effort into the history of Nostradamus. Perhaps you should debate Peter Lemesurier over some facts? (Not that Peter Lemesurier has any answers beyond the historical facts and records of Nostradamus)

As for the quatrain said to be about King Henry II being killed in a jousting accident, that accident occurred in mid-1559. That quatrain was first published in 1555. Before the accident, Henry demanded Nostradamus appear before him and explain the meaning of The Prophecies. Nostradamus responded with a letter, which was dated in 1558, and first published in 1566. Nowhere in the letter does Nostradamus explain, "I see you dying in a jousting accident, Sire." However, Catherine de Medici began the rumor that Nostradamus predicted that event, and the rumor never died down. If Nostradamus had been warned of his king's death (in some prophetic vision), he would have warned him before he did any future jousting. (In the end, quatrain I-35 is not about something past. It is a prediction of events still to come in the future.)

The point is this: You ridicule EVERYONE who has wrongly interpreted a quatrain of The Prophecies. That proves nothing but how people who do not have any understanding of something can make wild and wrong staments of opinion about that something. Logic requires you submit factual evidence that disproves Nostradamus as a prophet; and if you wish to ridicule quatrain I-35, you need to first present evidence that proves what Nostradamus said that quatrain meant. You only show how foolish people think foolish things. Show where Nostradamus said what he meant, by referencing his letters that document what NOSTRADAMUS said his whole work meant, from which quatrain I-35 is 1/948th. Tell us how you see where Nostradamus explained, in his letter of preface, how to understand his poetic stylings in the quatrains, allowing one to realize a new syntax was used and must be followed to get the true meaning to appear.

Oh. I am getting a psychic impression now. I see you running away from that challenge because it would require you understand what you ridicule. You do not understand anything written by Nostradamus that explains and prefaces his work. I assume that is because you seek not to understand. It is my opinion that you have taken the simpleton's approach to opining on the subject of Nostradamus. Readers beware.

Posted by Robert T. on Sun 6 May 2012