Nostradamus

Chapter 1 For anyone with the tendency to let the mind wander across centuries, even millennia, Nostradamus' corner of the Rhone delta in sunlit southern Provence was a singularly appropriate place to be born. Six hundred years before the birth of Jesus it was already settled by Gauls, a Celtic people proficient in metalwork and chariotry thought to have originated from Turkey. In the wake of Alexander the Great's empire-building, Hellenistic Greeks arrived in the second century bc in their sleek, sail-assisted galleys. On exploring the environs of the craggy, pine-clad hills a few miles inland from the flat delta terrain they discovered a huge resource of excellent building stone. This they quarried to construct a most attractive small town, the remains of which, a mere five-minute stroll from Nostradamus' birthplace, are now recognised as France's oldest-known civilised buildings. The Romans in their turn further developed what the Greeks had begun, renaming the town Glanum. After their departure the now Christianised and ever independent-minded Provencals opted to build their own separate township, St-Remy-de-Provence. Their perennial usage of Glanum's dressed stone, their repeated discoveries of buried Roman artefacts, and the survival above ground of some of the larger Roman monuments ensured that the region's ancient past was not forgotten. By the turn of the Christian era's sixteenth century St-Remy had grown into a stout-walled little town of perhaps a couple of thousand inhabitants. And according to the local folklore, it was in a modest-looking house on the western side of its narrow Rue de Viguier (today renamed Rue Hoche) that the infant Michel de Nostredame, later to style himself 'Nostradamus', was born on December 14, 1503. What the St-Remy Tourist Office insists is that same house, no. 6, still stands to this day, marked by a rather dingy post-Second World War marble plaque set above the doorway. Peter Lemesurier has sharply criticised his fellow Nostradamian John Hogue for illustrating the right street but the wrong house on the title-page of his lavishly illustrated Nostradamus: The New Revelations. However, since my wife and I managed to miss the plaque during our first stroll down the street, our sympathies lie somewhat with Hogue. Undeniably no. 6, which is not open to the public, today has a distinctly uninviting and unprepossessing appearance. However, as pointed out by St-Remy's early twentieth-century local historian Henri Rolland, structural alterations carried out since Nostradamus' time have caused the edifice to lose 'all of its character and distinctiveness, its chimney, its sculptures and the tower which once topped it'. As a year in which to be born, 1503 had a certain charm. Around the very same month that the infant Michel first sucked at his mother's breast the fifty-seven-year-old Christopher Columbus was crossing the Atlantic on his fourth and last voyage opening up the New World. The fifty-one-year-old Leonardo da Vinci was in Florence putting the finishing touches to his portrait of Mona Lisa. The twenty-eight-year-old Michelangelo was in the same city chipping away at his sculpture of David. The crusty, newly elected Pope Julius II, who would commission Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, was just finding his way around the Vatican in Rome. And at the University of Erfurt in Germany a self-opinionated twenty-year-old student called Martin Luther was studying for his law examinations. On Nostradamus' parents and their ancestry, the world of Nostradamian studies stands deeply indebted to a dedicated St-Remy physician, Dr Edgar Leroy, who died in 1965, for some exhaustive researches4 that hWilson, Ian is the author of 'Nostradamus ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780312317911 and ISBN 0312317913.