All human affairs are subject to sudden reversals and one of Nostradamus’ aims is perhaps to catalogue, with or without astrological or prodigal signs, the potential for being plunged into evil and misfortune, in order to heighten readers’ awareness of the uncertainty that accompanies all human life. Universal peace, to begin with, is not destined to endure for long, says Quatrain 1:92, because soon enough there will come the time of pillage and rebellion, a third of a million people dying or being imprisoned in a city holding out in a siege by land and sea.1 In 5:5 there is a man who steals a march on others through the promises he makes and the hopes engendered by his engagements. ‘Feigning’ to put an end to their servitude, he usurps the liberty of the people and the city. His duplicity is worse than that of a young prostitute, abandoned ‘by the wayside’ reading ‘a false prologue’.2 Appearances are always deceptive and, in 5.34 Nostradamus indirectly calls for prudence when he says that, from the far west of England, where the English ‘chief’ resides, a fleet will enter the Gironde estuary, passing before Blaye, and it will be loaded not with wine and salt in its cargo barrels but gunpowder, presumably for nefarious purposes.3 Salt and wine are, no doubt, two commercial cargoes that were often associated with one another, but they also signify two elements of human life that embody divine power. Salt is what God sends, if He wishes, to make the land infertile and represents, thus, misfortune. Wine is a symbol of plenty; produced in the Lord's vineyard by His people, it is a sign of contentment. In 5:94, it is a man's word that is worthless, it being a matter of someone who will undertake an expedition, passing into ‘greater Germania’ through Brabant and Flanders, via Ghent, Bruges and Boulogne. Feigning to accept the truce, the Grand Duke of Armenia, another person whose title evokes the Lower Empire, or perhaps the Crusades, will come to besiege Vienna and Cologne.4 The message seems to be that human words are the stuff of illusions.
Pacts never last very long in the face of self-interest. Nostradamus cites a ‘feigned alliance’ in 6:20 which will not be destined to last long, for those who had agreed to change their mind, will change it back again later.5 No one can know the course of his life, any more than the date of his death. At the end of the year 1554 Nostradamus predicts that there shall be a monarch who desires his own death; but his presumptuousness will be rewarded by the opposite of the destiny he dreams of: ‘He wanted death to come to him as it did to Alexander (in conquering battle) but he shall die like Marius or Pompey (the architects of civil wars)’. In January, buildings will be demolished by a storm, states will totter, and there will be someone from low down in society who will be ‘raised up’ and someone else at the top of society who will be ‘brought low’. That is one of Nostradamus’ recurrent themes. In 10:57, the ‘upstart’, someone raised above his station, will have no respect for his sceptre – his rulership – and he will hate the young offspring of the grandees. Never has one seen one ‘more foul and cruel’ and, ‘as for the wives’ he will send them to a ‘black’ death.6 Quatrain 8:76 gives us a glimpse of someone ‘more a butcher than any English king’, also ‘born obscure’ who will rise to power by force. Faithless and fickle he will bleed the land dry: ‘His time approaches so near that I sigh’.7
Nostradamus brings the threads together of his infelix fortuna vision when he sketches out the lines of force for the year 1558. His thoughts about the course of human history are clearly and concisely laid out:8
O how changeable and profoundly variable events are! For the great, powerful magnanimous, strong and valiant soldier will be conquered by the cowardly, foolish knave, whose plotting would have been better carried out among women than among warriors. The good will give way to the bad. The just and good-natured will nothing profit from the triumph of true justice, and valiant captains will be utterly cast to one side.
No human activity is guaranteed complete success. It will only need the downpour between 11 and 13 August 1554 to stop ‘he’ who thought he was triumphant from achieving his ends. On the contrary, the worst often takes place, as in the events linked to the ‘strange novelties’ that will accompany the full moon in May 1554. What is new can be actually the return of a monster from the past, as when ‘a new Nero or Tiberius newly take root, bringing with them so many new oppressions’ that their contemporaries search around for ‘another Harmodios or Aristogiton’ and turn to assassination to put an end to their tyrants. And yet, since nothing under the sun or moon endures, ‘his violence will not last long’.
Ambition, pride, luxury, cupidity erode human confidence. The facts undermine unerringly the fictions with which we comfort ourselves. It will never be Spain, according to 5:49, but ‘ancient France’ where a pope will be elected to steer the wavering barque of the Church. But this pope will put his trust in the enemy who, under his domination and against expectations, will prove a cruel plague.9 An outcome which turns inexorably from good to bad is one of Nostradamus’ major themes. With it comes the warning that things will get still worse than they are, and have been. Quatrain 6:69 recounts how those who once dispensed charity will be constrained to ‘take’ by force, i.e. steal or pillage, so that they would have the wherewithal to survive. Naked, starving, thirsty and cold, they will form an army to cross the mountains, committing great havoc.10 What stands out is the image of an epoch in which the person who is quintessentially deceptive is also himself the one who changes. Thus, in 1:12 a ‘false brute’ will give every impression of being feeble; but he will be raised up ‘from low to high’ to govern Verona and, as soon as he is in charge, will ‘immediately turn disloyal and shifty’.11 It is perhaps an allusion to the Ghibelline Ezzelino da Romano (1194–1259) and his seizing of power in Verona, but (as we have repeatedly seen) factual reference points do not function as such in Nostradamus. In this instance the purpose is to articulate the power of duplicity to instigate a regime of evil, whose effects will go on being felt, to the point that human history seems frequently to be reduced to the slide from good to bad, and from bad to worse. Quatrain 6:67 tells of how a ‘great empire’ will come to be ruled by someone else, to whom kindness was still more alien than contentment. It will be governed by someone from the rabble (virtually the ‘dregs’), who will bring about great misfortune to countries.12 In 10:1, the enemy will not keep the promise that they entered into and the prisoners will not be released. One captive will be put to death and rest abased and condemned for having put up a fight.13 Not telling the truth seems to rule human affairs. One quatrain we should bear in mind presents overweening confidence as a kind of lack of conscious awareness, which reality will soon correct. Quatrain 10:36 recounts an anecdote taking place in the Arabian peninsula. In response to bellicose rhetoric from the king of Souks, the island of Socotra [var. Soqotra]), the Harmotic Isle (perhaps the Isle of Ormuz [var. Ormus]) will hold him in disdain and disregard his menaces, no doubt because he had been too sure of his own power. But after a few years of plunder and depredations, the latter find themselves having to take his ‘tyranny’ seriously because of the risks to their power and security.14 It is a quatrain that almost turns into an aphorism on the vain transience of certainties and beliefs.
When man succumbs to the illusion of power, it leaves the way open to his human susceptibility to evil and to the planets determining his fate. So, in 5:72 a ‘voluptuous’ edict will allow a poison to enter the body politic and ‘law’ will be perverted, which implies that people will be licensed to go against the ancient order of things, which will prove dangerous.15 This is perhaps a nod in the direction of Venus, planet of carnal desires and sensuousness, fooling human beings by seeming to follow a virtuous course and, in so doing, alienating the ‘law’ of the sun, the Law of God. To that, we should add the oracle referred to in 1:47, a text according to which, around Lake Geneva, sermons will be so tedious that ‘days shall be reduced by weeks, / Then months, then years, then all shall come undone’. This image inverts the traditional image of the end of time, when days become as long as weeks, weeks as months, months as years.16 All the inhabitants will die out, and it shall only remain to the magistrates to give up pronouncing judicial sentences since they will have no point, human society having vanished. If we try and render this bleak picture of human beings and their prospects in symbolic terms, we are bound to admit that, for Nostradamus, the essential point is that earthly misfortune is synonymous with human presumption. Man's desires lead nowhere, and his best laid plans remain unrealized.
When not the author of his own sinfulness, or the one who slides into sin, man is subject to astral influences, and especially planetary conjunctions. Change is therefore ineluctable. Pierre Brind’Amour explains Quatrain 6:2 in terms of just such a planetary conjunction which will take place in ‘around 1580’ and which ‘the heavens testify’ will inaugurate ‘a most strange century’. In the Year 703, various (from ‘one to five’) realms will experience a transformation.17 There will be great expeditions, too, according to 1:43, led by ‘those of the East’ under the influence of the moon, and which, in the year 1700, will conquer ‘almost the northern corner’.18 Above all, the convergence of Jupiter and Saturn (in 1:51) at the head of the constellation of Aries (the Ram) will be the start of an era of misfortunes, plagues, famines and wars:19
Eternal God, what mutations!
Then the long turn of the century brings back bad times:
Gaul and Italy; what troubles!
A planet is said to be in ‘triplicity’ in astrology when it is in a sign belonging to the same element as its own (each of the four elements – earth, air, fire, water – being assigned to three astrological signs each). So, in Quatrain 1:50 ‘aquatic triplicity’ will lead to the birth of ‘one’ who will ‘make Thursday his feast-day’.20 His renown, praise, sway and power shall increase until there will be a ‘tempest’ by land and sea in the East. Is this an allusion to the ‘great Jovialist’ (Thursday being the day of thunder) to which Nostradamus refers in 10:73, who, in a sort of mélange of past and present shall come to try and rule the world and pass laws hostile to the clergy?21
Other baneful planetary conjunctions appear elsewhere in the quatrains. When Saturn the falcifer (‘sickle-bearer’) and Mars will conjoin in the sign of Leo (5:14), Spain will be captive. Near Malta, Rhodes will be seized by the Libyan leader in time of war, whilst the Pope will be attacked by the cock (the king of France?).22 When ‘the two rogues’ Mars and Saturn will be in the sign of Scorpion, the great Lord will be murdered in his palace (1:52). With the appearance of the new king, plague will ravage the Church in Southern and Northern Europe.23 When Mars and Jupiter (‘the sceptre’) come together in the sign of Cancer (says Quatrain 6:24), then a catastrophic civil war will break out. But shortly after a new king will be consecrated who will restore a long-lasting peace.24
When two eclipses of the Moon and Sun occur in succession, according to 3:4, then cold, drought, and danger on the frontiers will follow, even ‘where the oracle had its beginning’.25 The following quatrain says that another double eclipse will occur between April and May. The result will be dearth, although help will arrive from ‘two great benefactors by land and sea to all parts’.26 Quatrain 8:15 tells of another eclipse that will have an impact on northern parts, for a ‘tom-boy’ will ‘vex’ Europe and the world.27 Pierre Brind’Amour reckons that this could be an allusion to Isabella Jagiellon (1519–59), the daughter of Sigismund I, King of Poland, who married John Zápolya, King of Hungary [‘Pannonia’ in Nostradamus’ text], and whose death in July 1540 heralded a power struggle. Isabella confronted the former councillor of her husband, Giorgio Martinuzzi, Regent in Transylvania, who was supported by the Habsburg Ferdinand I, king of Bohemia and aspirant king of Hungary, and she asked for assistance from the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman, who undertook military campaigns in the Middle Danube on her behalf. But the connection is speculative.
Nostradamus implicitly theorizes the signs that are there for humans to comprehend that they cohabit with an abiding evil. It is an evil which they may not be conscious of because they live in the world of illusions, and because they do not focus on the superior forces which drive humanity towards evil and misfortune. The prophetic proposition rests on an allegorization of the uncertainty of the times. Quatrain 1:29 furnishes a particularly good example that is worth analysing. It concerns a strange ‘terrestrial and aquatic’ fish, washed up on the beach by a strong wave.28 It represents something other, whose appearance is contradictory, both attractive and repulsive at the same time, saline and sweet, bitter and suave all at once. Is this not a representation of the ambivalence, or even illusion, in which the inhabitants of the town (alluded to in the quatrain) are living, an illusion which could turn into a nightmare unless they wake up to what is happening, and to the fact that what is benign can rapidly turn malign? The fish could be seen as a symbol of the destiny of the soul, given over to the menace which is within, surrendered to the very duality which is this earthly life, whose serenity is forever at risk of being overturned. The enemy is also, and above all, within – not least because it was often the case that the Christian soul was conceived as a city or citadel whose virtue was besieged by vices. In the same way, human existence was often represented as a ship:29
The strange ship through tempest at sea
Shall make landfall near an uncharted bay:
Despite the warning signs by palm branches waved,
Death, then pillage: good advice came late.
What this quatrain seems, at first sight, to be about is a ship coming from somewhere else, pushed off-course by a storm, which will turn up in an unknown port. Despite the pacific signs heralded by the waving of palm branches, the sailors on board will face death and pillage, with warning advice arriving too late.30 Deeper down there again resurfaces the motif of illusory signs, hiding sinister intentions. To reach that port might have seemed a salvation to those sailors whose lives were put at risk by the storm, only to find themselves facing a still greater danger. One danger lurks behind another, and above all when we imagine that we have lived through all the dangers. It is therefore possible to make sense of this quatrain as an exhortation to prudence in a Christian soul. Life is like crossing a dangerous sea, but the safe haven can be yet more perilous for he who does not watch out for the duplicitous perils ahead. Hell might well be in store. Nostradamus seems to want to indicate that spiritual death awaits the person who blindly trusts in ‘signs’ and lets himself be waylaid by the chimera of certainty. It might even be that there is ill-intent in the signs themselves, not least because for Nostradamus, as we have seen, human language is harmful because of the snares and delusions which words spawn. Doubt alone, it seems, can save man from himself, and from other men – and that especially when religious creeds are supposing to dictate the truth to Christians on matters concerning faith, salvation and beliefs.
Nostradamus seems fundamentally to want to speak afresh – through the enigmatic voice of these quatrains, whose insistence on the reality of human evil carries echoes of the Old Testament and of his reading of St Augustine – about the one and only truth which is contained in the enigma, in the refusal to say what one knows, in learned ignorance. Quatrain 5:35 is closely linked to the one just discussed, and it alludes to the free city on the ‘great Saline sea’ (the Baltic), where amber comes from (‘which carries stone still in its stomach’) and in which the English fleet ‘under cover of fog’ will come and brandish the (olive-) branch, after which open war will be declared by a ‘grandee’.31 War, in effect, will restart, by surprise and without warning after peace has been declared. Thus Nostradamus adds a dramatic touch to the idea that life is forever a snare and delusion, a bad dream. Nothing can be taken for granted. Whenever we imagine that we have succeeded in stopping the clock, and placed ourselves out of range of conflict and war, that illusion is shattered and immediately refashioned into what it truly is, an immense tragedy, orchestrated around the inherent human desire to sin. It is as though all human efforts are vain and worth nothing, as against the proclivity towards violence or evil, as against the sin of Adam which man is condemned to bear within him. No words can save him, and we need to let the repetitive nature of Nostradamian writing reiterate that for us. So, in 1:38, the sun and the eagle will appear to the victor. The vanquished will be given a vain promise of peace, for neither trumpet nor cries of alarm will stop the troops setting out upon vengeance, and the promised peace will only happen after a bloody massacre.32 Nothing should be taken at face value. In 8:41 a person called ‘Renad’ (is this an anagram of ‘André’, the Man, or simply an allusion to the ‘fox’ (renard) which, according to Richard Roussat, is, by its skill at dissimulation, the imitator of the ‘fraudulent, lying, all-deceiving Scorpion’?) will be elected ruler without ever having pronounced a single word. He will act the saint in public and live off barley bread, but then suddenly he will turn into a tyrant, trampling under foot the greatest in the land.33 Barley, of course, was what one fed to animals, and to eat bread made of it was to show that one was humble, a humility which Renad counterfeits. A ‘cake of barley bread’ was also what ‘tumbled into the host of Midian, and came unto a tent’ (Judges 2:7:13), becoming the instrument of Gidian's victory over the Midianites and Amalekites, a symbol that it is only in weakness that God's power is manifested.
Despite the declaring of a truce and the concluding of peace, it will be by a ruse that a fleet will be captured by the inhabitants of Barcelona in 6:64.34 In September 1554 an accord will be re-established between two great potentates, hitherto ‘sworn’ enemies, who will ‘go through the motions of being friends’. That will mean that no engagement on either side will have any validity. Violence and evil are never absent in Nostradamus’ imagined universe – even to the point where, in the Alamanac for 1555, princes and kings are imagined asleep, but still dreaming up the potential intrigues and violence with which to confront one another. There is a kind of perpetual transfusion principle at work. If peace is achieved in one part of the world, then war has to break out somewhere else. In 5:42, Mars will be at its highest apogee when the Savoyards are forced out of France (they had probably invaded beforehand). At this very moment, the Lombards will have the fright of their lives for they will be menaced by ‘those of the Eagle’ (the Holy Roman Empire), acting under the sign of Libra.35 A similar trend will be evident in the French kingdom in 9:52, which envisages peace breaking out on the one hand, and war on the other. At that moment, the persecution will be fierce, leading to laments from men and women as the ‘blood of innocents’ is spilled ‘on the land’.36
Violence can spill over from one part of the world to have consequences everywhere, as when (in 1:55) ‘under the opposite Babylon clime’ there will be a great spilling of blood which will result in earth, air, sea and land being ‘polluted’. ‘Sects’ and realms will then be ravaged by plagues, famine and confusion.37 When (in 3:3), in furthest Asia, there is an earthquake, Corinth and Ephesus will then find themselves in a plight. But beforehand, there will have to be a conjunction of Mercury, Mars and the Moon, and in the South there will be extreme drought.38 Hope will turn out to be an illusion in the face of human malevolence when (in 7:13) someone with a shaved head (a monk) will seize the ‘satrapy’ of the ‘maritime, tributary city’. He will say that he wants to cleanse the city of the ‘squalid’ but he will do exactly the opposite, becoming a tyrant for fourteen years.39 Power seems to live and breathe all that is evil and he who takes up the reign of power to bring corruption to an end becomes himself corrupt. Nostradamus repeats that message over and over again. On the banks of the River Var (8:97), power will change hands when three beautiful children are born(?) somewhere close by; but ruin will come upon the people when they grow up, and ‘so that the country shall flourish no more’.40 Evil wins out, or rather it triumphs if it is not checked by a change in fortune. It will bring its author to the highest honours, and as though it is the only way to advance oneself. So, there is a person well up in the kingdom, evoked in Quatrain 6:57, a wearer of a cardinal's hat and ‘close to the hierarchy’, who was ‘harsh and cruel’ and would inspire such fear that he will succeed to the sacred monarchy (the papacy).41
In the Prognostication for the Year 1555, Nostradamus draws his inspiration directly from Andrea Alciato's Emblematum Libellus (1546), using specifically emblem 124 which portrays the fierce encounter between a proud lion and a wild boar under the motto: ex damno alterius, alterius utilitas (‘One man's loss in another man's gain’), under the gaze of a vulture who knows that the body of whichever of the protagonists ends up being killed will be his carrion. In the French translation of Alciato's text, published in Lyon in 1549 by Guillaume Rouillé, Alciato noted that this was like the battle of Christian princes, tearing Europe apart under the gaze of the Turk, who was ready to enjoy the ‘fruit of their loss’.42 Nostradamus paraphrases it:43
The major cities of France will groan against their princes because of exactions, France will be emptied, Italy troubled, Germany mutinous, Spain vigilant, the Turks in high hopes, Ex damno alterius utilitas. May it be God's will, by his grace, that what transpires on the last day in March turn out to be true, and that the one who shall speak to the prince, King or monarch, that will be for a thoroughly executed peace. But another will appear who will prevent all that has appeared before, someone who will seem to have been born of a monstrous birth in the revolving order of things, and who will judge summarily the shuddering land, [and there will be] a new sign in the heavens, land and sea will turn red, princes will be double-crossed and deceived by vain architects [of misery].
Military commanders – kings, princes, captains or emperors, are often the harbingers of violence and evil. Nostradamus’ writing is preoccupied, above all, with the Great, depicting the vicissitudes of their lives as a perpetual rollercoaster of greatness followed by fall, of power followed by death.44 Quatrain 1:39 reads as follows:
By night the emperor, strangled in his bed,
Having outlived his time: the fair one elected,
The empire claimed by three and ruined,
Will put him to death; letter and packet left unread.
The common people hardly make any appearance in his writings, or they are simply alluded to as part of a brutalized and victimized totality, part of the almost a million prisoners (for instance) in the troubles that threatened the existence of Marseille, Narbonne, Toulouse and Bordeaux in 1:72.45 In another quatrain, when an army is defeated, the soldiers are killed but the captain manages to escape. For Nostradamus everything happens as if political and military power embodies evil, violence, destruction and rage. A great monarch, says 1:99, consorts with two kings allied in friendship, ‘O what a sigh!’ it adds. He will assemble a mighty army and more's the pity for the children around Narbonne.46 Quatrain 8:79 tells of a man, born of a nun, who will kill his father and, ‘of Gorgon's blood will give new issue’. Then, in a foreign land he shall be sworn to silence but he shall burn himself and his own son.47 A tragic end awaits the tyrant, or the committer of evil.
Anna Carlstadt has also noticed the frequent appearance of the theme of the ignorant ruler, Nostradamus often taking on educated rulers too, governing without regard to law or good faith. Power is therefore more often culpable by default, as in the case of the ‘Roman king’ in 5:13 (in which it is conceivable – no more – that there is an allusion to Emperor Charles V's reprisals against Ghent following its rebellion) who will come to punish Belgium with a barbarian army. Gnashing his teeth in rage, he will vanquish the ‘Libyans’ from Pannonia to the coasts of Gibraltar!48 Another emperor, in 1:60, will arise near Italy and he will be a great burden to his empire, and becomes more of a butcher than a prince as a result of his alliances.49 Regime change is also placed under the sign of moments when things go to the bad, with one quatrain evoking a miserable and unfortunate republic who will be ravaged by the new magistrate that is put in charge of them.
The influence of the ‘political augustinianism’ cultivated by Cornelius Agrippa is obvious here, focusing on the triumph of force in the hands of ‘princes shielding their avarice and cruelty with the sword of justice’.50 Agrippa had devoted a whole chapter of his On the Vanity and Uncertainty of the Sciences to ‘the police or government of cities and republics’. There he set out a critique of political philosophy. No regime was capable, in his eyes, of being regarded as any better than any other. Democracy, aristocracy, royalty are all equally bad:51
The Romans also making use of this Form of Government, became Masters of the greatest part of their Empire under Democracy, and were never in a worse Condition than under the Command of their Kings and Nobility; but chiefly suffered from their Emperors, under whose Command their vast Dominion suffered shipwreck. So that which of these three Forms is best, is hard to judge, since there is neither of them but has its strong Defenders and Oppugners. Kings, they say, who Command altogether according to their own Will and Pleasure, seldome Govern well, and very rarely without War and great Combustion. Kingly Rule hath also this most unavoidable Mischief in it, that they who before we counted good and just, having obtain'd as it were a Regal Authority, and Liberty to do evil, grow uncontrollable, and the worst of Men […] Kings and Princes that nowadays Reign, think themselves Born and Crown'd not for the sake of the People, not for the Good of their Citizens and Commonalty, not to Maintain Justice, but to defend their own Grandeur and Prerogative; Governing so, as if the Estates of the People were not committed to their Custody, but to be shar'd and divided by them, as their own proper spoyl and prey. They use their Subjects at their pleasure, and as they list themselves, abusing the Power with which they were Entrusted; Oppress their Cities with borrowing, the Common People, some with Taxes, some with Penal Statutes, others with excessive Subsidies and Imposts, without Measure and without End. Or if some more moderate do release the excess of these Grievances, they do it not in respect of the Common good but for their own Private ends, permitting their Subjects to be at quiet, that they may live at ease themselves; or else to gain to themselves the name of being Mild and Just; Others most severely punish guilty Offenders, Confiscating their Goods, and setting great Fines upon their Heads, not caring how many they take in the same Premunire. For as the Offences of Delinquents are the strength of Tyrants, so does the Multitude of Offenders enrich Princes…
The fashion of representing history as dominated by the fatal malignity of princes and grandees does not, then, originate with Nostradamus. That negative picture predates his own desire to denounce it. Here is a quatrain that suggests that even his inclination towards that view is a snare. Quatrain 1:78 tells of a half-wit of a son, born to an aged chief, who is deficient in knowledge and arms. The king of France will then be held in fear by his sister, and fields will be divided up and given to his cavalry officers.52 Aristocrats live for war, and Nostradamus cites an adage from Erasmus in order to temper this bellicose propensity which, in 1555, would lead Christianity towards the brink of catastrophe:53
O what rage there will be between the barbarous nation, such as was never seen since the time of Tamburlaine. Christendom will receive a grievous wound, war will be fiercer and more furious than ever before. But in the two parts of the world towards the South and North the greatest losses will on the whole be sustained by the prince of Gaul. The opposite party is content to do like the Sagontes before being subjected to the Gauls, notwithstanding the conjunction of the Sun with Mercury in the Spring of this year. Some ambassadors and envoys will arrive in France to negotiate some peace deal, but Annosa vulpes non capitur laqueo (‘You cannot catch old birds with chaff’). And no deal will be concluded, although there is agreement among most of the parties.
It is not difficult to hear, as though in echo of this coming war, a resonance of Erasmus’ Complaint of Peace (Querella pacis undique gentium eiectæ profligatæque) when he sets out the ‘shameful or frivolous motives’ that incite princes to take up arms on behalf of their peoples. Erasmus’ philosophia Christi condemned warfare; and Nostradamus’ writing indicates the need for such a condemnation. His monumental and overloaded fresco of crimes and punishments portrays warfare's horrors, hoping to neuter this warlike inclination through his evocation of wars to come. Anna Carlstedt has already put on record that in Nostradamus’ Prophecies, one war inevitably leads to another.54 Sometimes violence is the more terrifying because it does not seem to have its origin in any ‘identifiable actor’. It simply emerges from the anonymity of its protagonists – perpetrators and victims. The bloodshed occurs in the quatrains with God nowhere to be seen:55
The city taken by deceit and fraud
By means of a handsome young man duped:
Wall, woman, church and nun violated,
By sword, fire, cannon, plague, all will die.
We should not start with the presumption that, for Nostradamus, it is in man's capacity, any more than in his nature, to be constant. He is, in his being, often split into two halves.56 What happens to be the case at one moment in time will become inevitably no longer the case and it is that variability which makes human life, in Nostradamus’ perspective, precarious, capricious, and therefore tragic. Quatrain 2:9 introduces us to ‘the thin one’ who shall rule ‘for nine years in peace’ before becoming prey to ‘a huge thirst for blood’ and, because his will is ‘without faith and law’, a ‘great people’ will be put to death before the tyrant is himself killed by someone ‘much more handsome’ than he.57 As we have already seen, the destiny of each and every person is only superficially in their own hands. The tragic chains of destiny unfurl for other reasons, which have nothing to do with mankind's propensity to evil. It is as though, whether for this reason or that, man is incapable of being constant in goodness. In 1:88 the sacred disease (epilepsy) afflicts the great prince shortly after his marriage. His reputation and standing will suffer greatly and his chief advisor will be killed ‘by shorn heads’ (i.e. by monks).58 Madness lurks about us, and can drive us to parricide, suggests 1:22, where someone who has lost his mind survives to put to death his ‘artificer’, the one who has brought him into the world.59 Even more, because the Nostradamian set-up wants to encompass all the potential for evil, he shows man driven to things that he would never have dreamt of doing. Man's humanity inclines him to become inhuman. So it will be only somewhat after the event, in 1:36, that the monarch will come to repent for not having put to death his adversary. His initial weakness, which had led to his leniency, will mean that he will have to sanction a much greater violence, meaning that ‘all his blood will have to be shed in death’.60 The remorse shown in this context is exceptional.61 It is more often the case that the shedding of blood demands, as in the Old Testament, more blood to be shed.62
Man, if not evil from the very beginning, inevitably becomes so, and worse than one could possibly imagine to be the case. It is one of the further elements of the tragic picture of humanity that Nostradamus paints for us that, if man is evil, he does not necessarily suffer for it. On the contrary, the bad are by no means always chastised for their misdeeds, albeit they cannot expect to be protected from the worldly vicissitudes that afflict everyone. Their punishment is also a part of the Nostradamian set-up, alongside the Biblical theme of retribution reflecting the sins of the sinner. So, in 5:100, the arsonist will be consumed by his own flame whilst the sky will be ablaze above Carcassonne and in Comminges.63
The theme of the mutability of time and the created order is orchestrated, therefore, around that of the corruption of souls and of the social order. That is why Nostradamus announces that, before long, ‘all things will be ordained’ – i.e. that a cycle of time is accomplished and that a grim century is awaited.64 There is a great change to come, one which will affect the situation of the ‘masks’ or ‘masked’ (bishops) and the ‘alone’ (monks) and not many will preserve their rank.65 There will come a king who will govern by turning things upside down. He will give authority to strangers, exiles from their homeland, and will make the perfect gentle knights swim in blood, and his reign, contrary to just rule, will be a long one.66 Nostradamus seems to be obsessed with the theme of the undermining of laws set down since time immemorial, or the subverting of an order which ought to remain inviolable because it belonged to the order of the world itself. So, in 5:38 a mighty king will ascend the throne who will condone ‘illicit and lubricious’ living among his subjects. He will give in to the demands of one and all such that, by the end, even the Salic Law will be forgotten about.67 This story of things being cast assunder can be applied to the Church. In 5:92 the Roman See becomes subject to a take-over which will last for seventeen years, during which time there will be a succession of five popes before one is elected to the throne of St Peter ‘concurrently’ with another ‘who will not exactly follow the Roman way of things’.68 The number seventeen here might be an allusion to the seventeen years of Jacob's time in Egypt, the seventeen years of Roboam's reign in Jerusalem, etc.69 No one and nothing is spared, no matter how high in the social order. The event prefigures a sequence of catastrophes. In 5:15 the pope is taken captive whilst on the high seas. The plans are set awry and the priests are up in arms. The next elected pope, absent, will find his see ‘bien debise’ (i.e. ‘confiscated’) and his bastard favourite put to death.70 In 5:44 the cardinal will be seized by pirates, also whilst at sea, and the state of peace will be gravely troubled. There will be avarice and wrath, and the papal army will have its numbers doubled.71
The horrors of war are glimpsed through a great defeat in the field in Perugia and the violence which will take place close by Ravenna whilst it celebrated a sacred festival. The victor's horse will eat the oats of the vanquished.72 Should this be interpreted as an allusion to the Battle of Ravenna, which took place beneath the walls of the city on Easter Sunday 1512? At all events, in Nostradamus’ text the fates are symbolically inverted and, almost ironically, it is the oats of the defeated horses that are eaten by the conqueror's horses. War is the more evil for being a contradiction; it pits mankind against heaven, and forces men to look only earthwards. Quatrain 1:57 is highly unusual in that it underlines what is, for Nostradamus, an obvious non sequitur, declaring that, as a result of great discord, the trumpet of war shall sound. The accord being broken, the trumpet will defy Heaven and issue a clarion call to war. The bleeding mouth of a man will then be awash with blood whilst his face, smeared with milk and honey, will be pitched to the ground.73 We have to suspect here that Nostradamus was setting out to denounce war, to the extent that that is what makes the man turn his face to look only earthwards, that which makes blood the only matter about which he talks, that which makes him take pleasure in the things of this earthly life as though it was a Promised Land, a new Canaan.
Nostradamus seems here to be writing in the Erasmian tradition of stigmatizing the inhumanities of war, making them stand out by means of repetition. In 1:37 an uncertain battle will be engaged just before sundown for the ‘great nation’. The defeated will be granted no asylum in the maritime port in their flight. The sea will become a sepulchre on two foreign shores.74 In war death is the victor, and Nostradamus alludes to the murderous campaigns that will ravage Europe in the quatrain in which those from Lerida will go as far as the Moselle, putting to death those between the Loire and the Seine. Help will come by sea near Hauteville (the ‘high town’) whilst Spain sheds blood far and wide.75 Men are seized by savage instincts and it is no coincidence that, as in Antiquity, savage beasts are pictured as presaging war, pushed by hunger to cross rivers. In 2:24, the main military encounter will take place close by the Danube (the ‘Hister’), and then it will be in an iron cage that the ‘grandee’ will be dragged along whilst the child from Germany surveys another great river, the Rhine.76 It is the wolf, to be even more precise, which is chosen to symbolize the atrocity of war, because it bites and tears its prey apart. In 3:33, when the wolf enters the city, it is a sign that the enemy is at hand. A foreign army will lay the country to waste whilst friendly forces will traverse the Alps.77
Wild animals serve not only as auguries, but also serve as allegories for the dehumanizing forces which appear in crimes of human violence. In 2:42 it is cocks, dogs and cats which feast on the blood oozing from the wound of the tyrant who has just been put to death. Another, who had no fear of dying a cruel death, has his arms and legs crushed in someone else's bed.78 Nostradamus is probably playing here on the past history of the English incursions into Aquitaine or the Loire valley to enhance the sense of the unfurling of violence. He was no doubt using Froissart when he made the correlation between periods of excessive rainfall and hard frosts on the one hand and the attacks to which ‘Port Selyn’ (unquestionably a reference to Bordeaux) will be subjected.79 Then, in 4:46, it is the city of Tours which is urged to protect itself from ‘imminent ruin’.80 The ‘Black’, in the following quatrain, will manifest his blood hand ‘by fire, sword and bended bow’ (a reference, perhaps, to the Battle of Poitiers, a major engagement in 1356 during the Hundred Years War) and all the people will be terrified at the sight of their lords hanging by their necks and toes.81 There are images of bodies torn apart, mangled, suspended this and that way up, even the sight of soldiers frightens the very elements of the earth. So, in 1:20, when Tours, Orléans, Blois, Angers, Rheims and Nantes find themselves beset by a sudden change of fortune, with pitched tents and men speaking a foreign tongue under their very walls, the rivers silt up and there are earthquakes on land and sea.82
The principle that sudden changes of occurrence which govern our destinies are announced by preternatural signs is evident. The Book of Prodigies of Julius Obsequens recounts an incident from the year 649 which occurred at Trebula Metusca in the overture to the Games, when black snakes encircled the altar whilst someone was playing a flute. Nostradamus cites this incident and then makes a connection with a military event in 1:19:83
When the altar is encircled by snakes,
Trojan blood vexed by the Spaniards:
By them great number shall meet their fates:
Chief fleeing, hidden in the marsh amidst the reeds.
It referred to a great defeat inflicted by the Lusitanians on the Roman army and the descendants of Aeneas and his companions. Julius Obsequens adds that, the following day, the snakes returned and were killed and that, when the doors of the temple were opened, the wooden statue to the god Mars was found overturned. Nostradamus omits these details and simply says that the Romans lost many men and, above all, that the leader of their army was reduced to hiding in the marshes amidst reeds. Reeds are the symbol of human frailty (‘For the Lord shall smite Israel, as a reed is shaken in the water, and he shall root up Israel out of this good land, which he gave to their fathers, and shall scatter them beyond the river, because they have made their groves, provoking the Lord to anger’ – 1 Kings: 15). As is evident, the reference to preternatural events in the Ancient world serves only one objective, which is to lead the reader towards the understanding that everything which happens in this world comes back to the power of the Almighty, refers back to the Word. It reiterates the pronouncement of the fragility of the human condition, submitting itself entirely up to the divine Will, encountering only evil and misfortune when it relies on its own resources and becomes engaged in the hazards of war. War can but lead to evil, and do evil, because it is the instrument of ambition, pride and cruelty. As the reed before the wind bends in the breeze so the carnal spirit, filled with its own pride but empty within, sways to conform to the motion of things and men. It becomes, in the words of Christ, ‘a reed that bends before the wind’.