The Prophecies
Page 42
10.31 Ishmaelites: Cf. 9.43; 9.60. Carmania: Used by Ptolemy and others to refer to the northern Persian deserts of Parthia and Aria; also a satrapy on the Persian Gulf, west of Hormoz.
10.33 the diphthong town: Fiesole, nearby to Florence?
10.36 Harmotic: From the Greek harmotikos (fit for joining)? Hermetic?
10.37 Bourget: All the place-names in this quatrain were located in the duchy of Savoy.
10.38 Santa Barbara: Her feast day on December 4? Place-name? “Barbarian saint”? Orsini: Major Roman family, rivals of the Colonna. Adria: Venice.
10.39 Before he turns eighteen: Read by at least one contemporary of Nostradamus (the Venetian ambassador to France in a secret diplomatic dispatch of November 1560) as predicting the future demise of the sickly dauphin of France, François, who was fourteen years old at the time of the composition of this quatrain (1558) and had just married Mary, Queen of Scots. After the accidental death of his father, King Henri II, in July 1559, the fifteen-year-old François II succeeded him on the throne, only to die eighteen months later (without issue) of an ear infection. He in turn was succeeded by his ten-year-old brother, Charles IX, in December 1560.
10.40 The young prince: From Froissart’s account of the troubled reign of Edward II of England, son of Edward I? Cf. 9.49. LONOLE: London?
10.41 Caussade & Caylus: All the place-names in this quatrain are located in the Agen region, where Nostradamus briefly resided.
10.44 Blois: Cf. 8.38 and 8.52. Blois was the ancestral seat of the Orléans branch of the house of Valois. Memel: Important port of the Hanseatic League (in today’s Lithuania).
10.45 The Kingdom of Navarre: May allude to the mercurial Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Vendôme and king of Navarre from 1555 to 1562. The vow made in Cambrai: With the Treaty of Cambrai of 1529, King François I renounced his claims to Naples, Artois, and Flanders; but the French broke this agreement in 1556 under Henri II, after the abdication of Charles V.
10.46 Elector of Saxony: Probably Maurice, elector of Saxony (1547–53), known as “Judas” for his shrewd manipulation of alliances in Germany. Initially aligned with the anti-Protestant Charles V, he shifted to Henri II’s side in 1552, then reverted to the Imperial cause.
10.47 Burgos: In the province of León in Spain. Formande: Formentera, in the Balearic Islands?
10.48 Laigne: The river Aisne, near the area of the Netherlands invaded by the Spanish in 1557?
10.49 new city: Naples (Neapolis in Greek)?
10.50 urn: Aquarius. Lorraine: The Meuse flows through the Lorraine, site of major flooding in 1523.
10.51 the low Germans: I.e., the Palatinate and the bishopric of Strassburg? Picardy, Normandy, Maine: All in northern France.
10.52 Leie & Schelde: The rivers Leie (Lys in French) and Schelde (Escaut in French) meet in Ghent, heart of the Spanish Netherlands. The port of Antwerp lies to the northeast.
10.53 The great Selin: If “Selin” is Henri II here, then the “first” mistress could be Diane de Poitiers, dealing with her rivals.
10.54 Malines: A lordship just north of Brussels.
10.55 the ill-starred wedding vows: Probably refers to the marriage of the fourteen-year-old future François II to sixteen-year-old Mary, Queen of Scots (with a possible pun on her name in line 3), in April 1558, just around the time of the composition of this quatrain. Cf. 10.39. Phoebus: Has been read as a cryptic reference to F[rançois] II (from the Greek phi [i.e., F] + beta, the second letter of the Greek alphabet = II), upon whose untimely death in 1560 the Catholic Mary returned to Scotland.
10.56 saved by a queen: Mary Stuart, Catholic queen regnant of Scotland in 1542–67? Tunis: Ruled from 1535 to 1570 by a Muslim puppet of the Hapsburgs.
10.58 the Selene monarch: Henri II. See notes to 2.73; 4.77. the new Macedon: Philip II of Spain. Cf. 9.35; 9.38; 9.64; 9.93. Peter’s barque: The Vatican. After the French defeat at Saint-Quentin in 1557, Spanish troops were menacing Rome and Marseille.
10.59 Bressans: From the province of Savoy north of Lyon.
10.60 Nice…Malta: Nice was in Savoy, Monaco and Malta independent Hapsburg protectorates, Modena an independent duchy, Savona and Genoa in the Genoese republic, Pisa and Siena in the duchy of Tuscany, and Capua in the Hapsburg Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Nolita: A personified imaginary place-name, from the Latin (“she who is unwilling”)?
10.61 Betta: From the Latin Baetis, the Guadalquivir River in Spain; or Baetica, one of the Roman provinces in Spain? Emorra: From Agusta Emirita, Mérida, the capital of the Spanish province of Extremadura. Scarabantia: Modern Sopron, city on the western borders of Hungary, at the foot of the Alps. Pannonia: Southern region of modern Hungary.
10.62 Sorbia: Also known as Lusatia, region between the Elbe and Oder rivers, encompassing Saxony and Prussia. Buda: Capital of Turkish Hungary. Salona: Now Solin, in Dalmatia. A play on Nostradamus’s Salon-de- Provence?
10.63 Cydonia: Chania, second-largest city of Crete? Ragusa: Today’s Dubrovnik, on the Adriatic coast; a Venetian colony. city of St. Jerome: He was born in Stridon, in the Roman province of Dalmatia.
10.64 the Colonnas: Powerful family of Renaissance Rome (and supporters of Charles V), rivals of the Orsini. Cf. 8.67.
10.65 The rough-lettered one: According to Lemesurier, the southern German knight Georg von Frundsberg (1473–1528), who, in the service of the Hapsburg dynasty of Charles V, led some twelve thousand Landsknechts in an advance on Rome in 1527, suffering a stroke in Modena just before the sacking of the city. Cf. 2.57; 2.93; 3.89; 10.20; 10.27.
10.66 American: Dubious. More likely derived from Amorica (place by the sea), traditional name given that part of Gaul that includes the Brittany peninsula and the territory between the rivers Seine and Loire. Reb: Apocope for “rebel”? Variously identified as Edward I (“Hammer of the Scots”) and Oliver Cromwell.
10.67 earthquake in the month of May: The astrological conjunction of lines 2 and 3, according to Brind’Amour, perfectly describes the time of the earthquake that took place at Montélimar (in the Drôme) on May 4, 1549, between ten and eleven in the evening. Annonay: North of Montélimar, beyond Valence.
10.68 the pirate ships: The Barbary pirates raided the coast just south of Nostradamus’s Salon throughout the late 1520s and into the mid-1530s.
10.69 Ambellon: Amiens (Ambianum in Latin)? Ambel, a commune in the Isère?
10.70 Reggio: Reggio di Calabria in the south of Italy, or Reggio Emilia in the north?
10.71 Thursday: Cf. the celebrations of Thursday at 1.50; 10.73.
10.72 nineteen ninety-nine: One of only nine actual dates provided in the Prophecies. Brind’Amour notes that this coincides with the total solar eclipse of August 11 of that year. The sky shall send a great King to defray: Leoni translates this as “From the sky will come a great King of Terror,” reading the French as un grand Roi d’effrayeur (where effrayeur indeed would mean: causing amazement, dismay, fright). Brind’Amour reads it the same way. The original, however, reads un grand Roi deffraieur (with no apostrophe). The noun defrayeur, as defined by Cotgrave’s 1611 Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, is cognate to our “defray” and in sixteenth-century French means: “A Cater, or Steward; one that in a journey furnishes, and defrayes the provision, and expence of the whole companie.” Lemesurier therefore translates this as “a great King and host” and reads the second and third lines as referring to the miraculous restoration to health, in his Madrid prison, of the dying king François, Duke of Angoulême, captured six months earlier by the Imperial forces at the battle of Pavia (cf. 2.26; 4.45; 4.75; 8.7). His recovery (as recounted in Guicciardini’s History of Italy) resulted from a magnanimous personal visit from his “steward” and jailer, Charles V, in August 1525—who (here at least) takes on the allegorical features of a Savior King. Before, after March: After signing the Treaty of Madrid in January 1526 (in which he renounced all claims over Italy, Flanders, and Artois and surrendered Burgundy), François I was officially set free on March 6, hand
ing over his two young sons (the future Henri II and François III) as hostages to Charles V to guarantee the terms of the treaty—which, in the event, he did not honor.
10.73 Jovialist: Often used by Nostradamus to refer to legislators (born under the influence of Jupiter). According to Lemesurier, this figure represents the “Angelic Pastor” predicted by the Mirabilis liber. Cf. 1.50; 5.79; 10.71.
10.74 The mighty number seven: The end of the seventh millennium (since the world’s creation)—which, according to Roussat and others, would fall in 1800 or 1887…or 4722. at the Games of the Hecatomb: The Olympic Games of ancient Greece were celebrated during the month of Hecatombaion, that is, in midsummer.
10.77 Quirites: Citizens of ancient Rome.
10.78 Rome: The sack of Rome of 1527? Cf. 2.57; 2.93; 5.81; 10.20; 10.27; 10.65.
10.79 Gallic Hercules: The Ogmion figure. See note to 1.96.
10.81 Hesperians: People of the West, Spaniards.
10.83 Ghent: Major commercial center of the Spanish Netherlands. Cf. 10.52.
10.84 The lord’s bastard girl: Possibly Elizabeth Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII, but declared illegitimate at the age of two and a half after the execution of her mother, Anne Boleyn. When this quatrain was composed in the spring/early summer 1558, her accession to the English throne was virtually assured.
10.85 The aged tribune: The fifty-five-year-old Cicero, intimidated by Pompey’s mob as he attempted to deliver a speech in defense of his friend Titus Annius Milo, who was accused of having murdered Publius Clodius Pulcher—subsequently rewritten into one of his most celebrated orations, Pro Milone.
10.86 King of Europe: Lemesurier hears echoes of the Third Crusade’s attempts to reconquer the Holy Land from Saladin, known as “the King of Babylon.”
10.89 In marble shall the walls of brick now rise: On his deathbed the Roman emperor Augustus boasted that “I found a Rome of bricks and left it to you of marble”—a metaphor for the empire’s strength, according to Cassius Dio. Seven & fifty years: Augustus (then known as Octavius) came to power in the Second Triumvirate in 43 B.C.E. and ruled fifty-seven years until his death in 14 C.E.—a period known as the Pax Augusta. Aqueducts: Cf. 4.80; 5.58; 8.27; 8.68.
10.90 a learnèd man of good counsel: Emperor Claudius (r. 41–56 C.E.), successor to the assassinated Caligula?
10.91 sixteen nine: No pope was elected in 1609.
10.92 Their leader: Presumably John Calvin (1509–1564).
10.93 The new barque: The mobility of the Vatican (the barque of St. Peter), as illustrated by the transfer of part of its empire to Avignon during the Great Schism of 1378–1417? Cf. 1.32; 5.45.
10.94 Hesperia: Cf. 10.81.
10.95 those who worship Fridays: I.e., Muslims (further symbolized by the crescent in line 3).
10.96 the faith with the sea’s name: Lemesurier suggests that the “religion du nom des mers” may punningly refer to the Marranos (or “secret Jews”) from whom Nostradamus’s family descended. Adaluncatif: Printer’s garbling of something on the order of “Andalus-caliph”? “Abdallah-caliph”? Aleph & Alif: Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, while alif (see probable rhyme on “caliph”) is the first letter of the Arabic alphabet.
10.97 which way the wind makes feather fall: From the old French expression “jeter la plume au vent” or “mettre sa plume au vent.” Cotgrave’s 1611 Dictionarie glosses this: “To grow carelesse, let the world runne; weigh not how matters passe, which way he goes, what course he takes, what thing he does.”
10.99 dogs: The dogs here are mâtins, that is, mastiffs, large watchdogs, suggestive of Cerberus, the Hound of Hell.