Although scholars agreee that Michel de Nostredame was born in 1503 to recently “Christianized” Jews in the town of St Rémy, Provence, the finer details of his family’s background and economic status are still debated. Some believe he was the son of a Jewish grain dealer called Jaume, while others say his father was a prosperous notary by the name of Jacques.

          His sympathetic biographers tell us that Michel’s mysterious talent for prophecy was the first encouraged by his grandfathers, both learned men of the renaissance, who in younger days were the personal physicians to the most free-thinking king of time, Réné the good of Provence, and his son, the Duke of Calabria. Their eager pupil showed a superior aptitude for math and the celestial science of astrology.

          His paternal grandfather deemed him ready at 14 to study the liberial arts at Avignon, the papal enclave of Provence. There Michel angered his priestly teachers by openly defending astrology and Copernicus. At 19 he was sent to study medicine at the University of Montpellier. He breezed through his baccalaureate examinations in 1525. Soon afterwards his schooling was disrupted for a few years by an outbreak of the bubonic plague: 16^th-century France suffered from seasonal bouts of le charbon, the black death. So severe was this new outbreak that Montpellier University closed its doors, and facutly and students alike fanned out through southern France to battle the disease. With a license to practice medicine in hand, Michel de Nostredame saddled up his mule, packed up his medical and astrological books and astrolabe, and set off on the open road on the rail of the plague. The emergency had liberated him from the fundamentally primitive views of his teachers and provided him with the freedom to put his medical theories to the test.

          Nostradamus followed the plague’s shadow westwards through Montpellier, Narbonne, Toulouse, and all the way to Bordeaux, never leaving a town until the danger had passed. He honed his skills and availed himself of the knowledge and the tachers of the Renaissance’s mystical under ground of alchemists, Moorish medicine men, Jewish Cabalists, and pagans. Some of his ideas on bleeding and hygiene were quite progressive and controversial for the times. By 1529 he returned to Montpellier, where he received his doctorate degree and adopted the Latinized name Nostradamus. He remained a professor of medicine there for the following three years until friction over the rigid and conservative curiculum became unbearable for him, and left to set up a practice in Toulouse.

          In 1534 he to Agen, where he became friends with the volatile Julius-Céaser Scaliger, one of the great minds of the Renaissance. In Agen Nostradamus fell in love and married. Strangely enough, he made no mention of the young woman’s name in his writings, nor does his supportive biographer, Chavigny, who can tell us not only that she was “of high estate, very beautiful and very amiable.” Some biographers believe her name was Adriète de Loubéjac. Skeptics have theroized that these biographers mistake Nostradamus’ bride for that of Scaliger, whose wife’s name was Andriète de Roques-Lobéjac. At 46 Scaliger married her when she was appraently newly orpahned aged only 16. There is a third possibility – that Nostradamus’ “Adriète” was a relation of Scaliger’s wife, pherhaps a cousin or even a half-sister. Be that as it may, it is known that she bore him a beautiful boy and girl. For the next three years Nostradamus eased into an idyllic family life and flourishing medical practice. Thnaks to Scaliger, his patients were the rich and beautiful of Agen.

          In 1573 tragedy struck with such brutual intensity that the young doctor’s spiritual and mental well-being was shattered. In that year plague retunrned to Agen. The healing hands that had cured thousands must have wrung themselves helplessy over the cooling corpses of his wife and children. Friends and family turned against him, holding him responsible for their deaths. Scaliger, who was prone to violent argument and breaking his friendships, chose this moment to castigate the young doctor. His wife’s family sued him for their dead daughter’s dowry, and won. His patients abandoned him, since their superstition convinced them that a doctor who can’t save his own family must be in league with the devil. Next he was questioned by church authorities for making a chance remarks years before. He had seen an inept workman making a bronze statue of the Virgin and commected that he was “casting demons.” After receiving the summons to face the Inquisition at Toulouse, Nostradamus packed up his mule with a few belongings and stole away into the night.

Little can be found in history’s records about the next six years of his life. It is at least known that he traveled as far as north as Lorraine, as far east as Venice, and lived for a time as far south of Sicily. One can suppose that he wondered through wester and southern Europe to avoid the church Inquisitors while trying to pick up the shattered pieces of his life on a pilgrimage of self-discovery. It is during this dark night of Nostradamus’ wandering soul that the first legends of his awakening prophetic powers began to emerge.

A group of Franciscan monks travelling one day along a muddy road near the Italian town of Ancona suddenly saw the solitary doctor walking towards them. As they approached he stood aside to let them pass, but on seeing Brother Felice Peretti he immediately bowed, then knelt in the mud before him. The friats, knowing that Peretti had previously been a swineherd and was a lowly birth, were puzzled by this homeage and asked Nostradamus to explain. He replied: “I must yield myself and bend a knee before his Holiness.” The friars were highly amused at the explantation but, 40 years after his chance meeting, Brother Peretti became Pope Sixtus V, 19 years after the death of Nostradamus.

Another legend chronicles Nostradamus’ stay at the the Château de Florinville where, on a stroll with his lordly host around the grounds, the conversation turned to prophecy. Florinville asked Nostradamus which pig would provide dinner that night, he replied without hesitation, “We will eat the black pig, but a wolf will eat the white.”

Florinville secretly ordered his cook to slaughter the white pig. The cook dressed the pig for the spit and left the kitchen on an errand, forgetting to close the door. On his return, he found Florinville’s pet wolf cub happily devouring the white pig. The horrified man shooed it away and ran to the corral to fetch the black pig. At dinner that night all mouths watered as the cook set the roasted pig before Lord Florinville, who smiled at Nostradamus across the table.

“We are not eating the black pig as you have predictied. And no wolf will touch it here.”

Nostradamus was adamant that this was the black pig that Lord Florinville eventually summoned the cook. Florinville was stunned, and his guests entertained, when the cook admitted everything under the penetrating gaze of Nostradamus gray eyes.

All legends aside, what we do know is that Nostradamus resurfaces in history in 1544 in Marseilles, where he sets up a practice in this ancient crossroads of the French Riviera.

The November rains that year began the winter og 1544-45, during which Provence suffered one of its worst floods on record. The swollen rivers were dotted with the bloated corpses of animal and people. By spring the rains and flood waters receded, leaving one of the most devastating pestilences of the century in their wake. Hysteria and death spread over most of southern France for several years. By 1546 Nostradamus worked around the clock for the next 270 days ministering to the sick.

With the assistacne of an apothecary named Joseph Turel Mercurin, Nostradamus produced fragrant herbal and rose-petal lozenges. He admonished his patients to keep these “rose pills” under their tongues at all times without swallowing them. Other surviving fragments of his medical journals imply that bleeding his plague patients was avoided (although he seems to allow bleeding for other remedies). Nostradamus advised patients to make sure their drinking water and bleeding were clean, and to open the windows of their foul-smelling bedrooms to fresh air. He suggested they eat balanced diet low in animal fat and get a moderate amount of exercise. These regiments of diet, exercise, and hygiene, along with his legendary health and fearlessness when facing disease, may have helped more to cure his patients than the rose pills themselves.

Once the danger had passed, the city parliament gave Nostradamus a pension for life, and the citizens of Aix showered him with gratitude and awards. It is said that he gave many of the gifts to the families and dependents of those he had not been able to save.

The hero of Aix next received a call for help from the City Fathers of Salon. He had no sooner cured the plague there when he received an urgent call from Lyons. Many stories and legends of questionable accuracy arise from his stay at Lyons, but it is historically noted that he eradicated a plague of whooping cough through mass prescriptions filled by one pharmacist René Hepiliervard.

He returned to Salon in 1547 to settle there for the rest of the life. He was enchanted by the little town’s beauty and dry, sunny skies. It is believed that he stayed with his brother Bertrand in his home. Bertrand is purported by some biographers to have introduced Nostradamus to an attractive and intelligent young woman of a wealthy and respected Salonaise family. Anne Ponsarde Gemelle, who was made a widow by the untimely death of a certain Jean Baulne, became Nostradamus’ second wife.

For the next eight years Nostradamus gradually withdrew from medical practice to engage himself in highly successful cosmetics cottage industry.

At this time he also plunged wholeheartedly into the occult. A room on the top floor of his house was transformed into a secret study, and he started writing an annual almanac that made few curtious stabs at prediction. He was so encouraged by the reaction to his prophecies that he embarked on an ambitious project: the future history of the world, told in 1,000 enigmatic quatrains (four-line poems), using a polyglot smattering of French, Latin, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek. This masterpiece has had interpreters of prophecy scratching their heads ever since.

He began work on Les Propheties on the night of Good Friday 1554. A total of ten volumes, or “Centuries” of one hundred quatrains each, was planned.

The first three Centuries were published in May 1555. They open with a Preface dedicated to his infant son, Céaser. This letter contained confessions and descriptions of his prophetic techniques, and a prose prophecy that stretched his vision all way to the year AD 3797. Nostradamus cranked out Centuries 4 through an incomplete Century 7 by 1557. The final three centuries were composed in 1557 and 1558, along with an ambitious prose prophecy letter know as the Epistle to HenryII, written in a macabre and psychedelic prose rivalling the biblical Book of Revelations. A few special copies of the Epistle and the last 300 quatrains were printed and found their way to the French court, but it was Nostradamus’ wish to delay general publication until after his death to protect his growing family from the mounting popularity and controversy of his prophecies.

By 1556 Nostradamus’ Les Propheties was the rage at court. After Queen Catherine de’ Medici was show a quatrain predicting the death of her husband, King Henry II, in a jousting accident, Nostradamus was summoned to Paris. His royal audience was a success and he became an intimate occult friend to the Queen. Nostradamus was safely ensconced in his Salon study when Henry II fulfilled that prophecy in 1559. Following quatrain 35 of Century I to the letter, Henry sustained a wooden splinter from the jousting shaft during a tournament; it rammed through his helmet’s golden visor and plunged behind his eye into his brain. On the night of his death, crowds gathered before the Inquisitors, burning Nostradamus in effigy and demanding the priests burn him in earnest. Only Nostradmus’ friendship with Queen Catherine saved him. This was the first of several successful prophecies the talk of the courts of Europe.

Persecution followed fame. During the early 1560s France was lurching towards the first of nine civil wars fought over religion and Nostradamus was being tormented by street ruffians in Salon. Though he outwardly practiced Catholicism, many Catholics viewed the Christianized Jew as a Calvinist heretic, while the Protestans and Calvinists of Salon cursed him as a papist.

With greater dangers came greater supporters. The Duke and Duchess of Savoy became his patrons. It is said he cast an accurate astrological forecast of their newborn son, who later became Savoy’s greatest ruler, Charles-Emmauel “The Great.” It is during this time that Nostradamus played with writing Centuries 11 and 12, but only fragments remain. From 1550 until his death he continued to crank out highly popular annual almanacs containing prose prognostications, and later, annual bundles of quartrains predicting the events of the coming year. Little from these original almanacs survive except for 141 quatrains published from 1557 through 1567, which are know as the Persages

In 1564, while on a “tour of pacification” through the Frech realm, Catherine de’ Medici (now the queen regent) and the adolescent King Charles IX made a point to visit the aging prophet of Salon. Before resuming their tour, Catherine had Charles IX honor Nostradamus with the little Counselor and Physician in Ordinary, with the privileges and salary this implied.

Nostradamus reached the high point of his prophetic carrer with only a year and eight months left to live. His noted robust health underwent a rapid collapse in 1566. In June, upon returning from the royal Embassy of Arles as a representative of the king, Nostradamus had a severe attack of gout, which soon developed into dropsy. He asked his family and disciples to move to his deathbed into his beloved secret study where, in great physical pain but spiritual serenity, he awaited his end. His last prediction concerened his own approaching death:

On his return from the Embassy, the king’s gift put in place. He will do nothing more. He will be gone to God. Close relatives, friends, brothers by blood [will find him] completely dead near the bed and the bench.

At daybreak on 2 July 1566 family and friends found him dead in his bed with his swollen leg propped on a bench, exactly as he predictied.

Anne carried out her husband’s final request that his coffin should be standing upright, enclosed within an inside wall of the church of the Cordeliers of Salon. On his tomb was inscribed the following epitaph in Latin:

Here rest the bones of the illustrious Michel Nostradamus, alone all mortals judged worthy to record with his near divine pen, under the influence of the stars, the future events of the entire world. He lived sixty-two years, six months and seventeen days. He died at Salon in the year 1566. let not posterity disturb his rest. Anne Ponsarde Gemelle wishes her husband true happiness.