Plague doctor, almanac seller, then prophet of fog
Michel de Nostredame (December 1503–July 1566) trained as an apothecary, fought plague outbreaks, and only later Latinised his name for yearly almanacs. Les Prophéties (1555) packed 942 poetic quatrains so vague that fans still retrofit them to headlines—while scholars call the matches mistranslation and wishful reading.
Born in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence on 14 or 21 December 1503 to notary Jaume de Nostredame, whose Jewish forebears had converted around 1459–60, Michel entered Avignon at fourteen but left when plague shut the university. He claimed eight years researching herbal remedies, then entered Montpellier in 1529 for a medical doctorate—only to be expelled when officials found he had practised the banned “manual trade” of apothecary. He kept working and gained fame for a “rose pill” said to guard against plague. In 1531 at Agen he married; in 1534 plague killed wife and two children. By 1547 he settled in Salon-de-Provence with rich widow Anne Ponsarde, fathering six children, and later bought into Adam de Craponne’s canal.
After another Italian trip he tilted toward the occult. An almanac for 1550 sold well; annuals followed, eventually holding at least 6,338 prophecies. Nobles sought horoscopes—though he often asked clients for birth charts and erred when calculating them himself. For Les Prophéties he obscured meaning with Virgilianised syntax, word games, and Greek, Italian, Latin, and Provençal. The first instalment (1555) held 353 quatrains; a posthumous 1568 omnibus gathers 941 rhymed quatrains plus one unrhymed, in “Centuries.” Fifty-eight quatrains of the seventh Century never survived intact.
Reception split between charges of fraud or madness and elite patronage. Catherine de’ Medici summoned him after the 1555 almanacs hinted at royal danger; by his death she had made him counselor and physician-in-ordinary to young Charles IX. Academic consensus denies supernatural foresight: the verses are too elastic to test. Gout became edema; on 1 or 2 July 1566 he died in Salon, later reburied in the Collégiale Saint-Laurent. The seer brand outlived the pharmacist.
Source: Nostradamus
