Born in St. Remy in southern France in 1503, Nostradamus gained fame first in the mid 1540s for his medical work with victims of a plague that broke out in Aix-en-Provence and Lyons. It was after this that he first began to make prophecies. His first group of prophecies was published in 1550 as an almanac of weather predictions. In 1555 he published the first of his 10 collections of prophecies (which, by the way, totalled to almost 1000) under the title Centuries. In 1566, Nostradamus died at Salon, in southern France.
Writing his prophecies always in verse, Nostradamus, like most prophets, predicted mainly falls from power and disasters. However, his prophecies were arranged in no apparent order.
His first prophecy was that brought him fame as a seer of the futer was as follows:
"The young lion will overcome the older one, in a field of combat in a single fight: He will pierce his eyes in their golden cage; two wounds in one, then he dies a cruel death."This is supposedly his prediction of the death of King Henry II of France. Henry used a lion as an emblem, and in a jousting contest in 1559 with a young opponent, he was stabbed through his helmet and died an agonizing death. Few of his prophecies contained anything close to a date, but his prediction of the great fire of London in 1666 said it would occur "in three times twenty plus six."
Nostradamus is said to have predicted the French Revolution, the deaths of Queen Marie Antoinette and Madame Du Barry, the fate of Napoleon, the abdication of King Edward VIII of England in 1936; and he came bery close to giving the name of Hitler and the event concerning him.
I enjoyed this article because it showed me that some people gained fame not from what they did but from what they saw.