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In his own day Nostradamus was acknowledged as the greatest seer alive, and even today he is often labeled as the most important prophet of European civilization. Many of his predictions, which were made public in the 1550s, appear to have come true. Nostradamus accurately foretold and gave the date of the Great Fire of London (1666). In another prediction, he noted that "Pasteur will be celebrated as a godlike figure." He prophesied that a man named Franco would cause a civil war in Spain. Another prophecy stated that an Austrian-born man named "Hister" (Hitler) would lead Germany in a great war but that "most of the battlefield will be against him." Nostradamus's uncanny ability to describe events and give names and dates for happenings that occurred nearly 400 years after his death makes it impossible to dismiss him as a charlatan.
In 1547 Nostradamus began to record his visions. Writing in verse, he composed four-line stanzas which were grouped into sets of 100 called "centuries." In these prophetic poems, he utilized puns, anagrams, scientific jargon, and Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and Celtic words. Supposedly, Nostradamus deliberately made his prophecies cryptic, because he thought it was dangerous to give people too clear a picture of the future and because he did not want to attract the attention of the agents of the Inquisition.
In 1555 he published his poetic predictions in a book entitled Centuries, which was an immediate best-seller, read throughout Europe. In 1558 he published an enlarged, second edition of Centuries, which was dedicated to King Henry II of France but which prophesied that king's death. In 1559 Henry II was accidentally killed in a jousting match when a lance pierced the visor of his golden helmet and wounded him in the eyes and throat. Nostradamus had predicted that Henry II "in a field of combat" would have "his eyes pierced in their golden cage" and would die "a cruel death" from "two wounds in one."
After the fulfillment of this prediction, Nostradamus's reputation as a seer soared. Deeply interested in the occult, Queen Catherine de Medicis, Henry II's widow, asked Nostradamus to come to Paris and live at the royal court. In Paris, he became the friend and adviser and, possibly, the lover of Queen Catherine. Most of Parisian society claimed that he was a divinely inspired genius, while the remainder considered him a fake or, even worse, a sorcerer. His predictions influenced politics, for rulers and diplomats searched through them for hints of coming events. After several years in Paris, Nostradamus was forced to return home to Salon because of gout in the joints of his legs.
On the night of July 1, 1566, his pupil Chavigny bid Nostradamus good night, to which the old man replied, "Tomorrow at sunrise I shall not be here." The next morning he was found dead at his workbench. He was entombed in the Chapel of St. Martha in Salon, in an upright position, because he did not want anyone to walk on his bones. Secretly, Nostradamus had arranged to have a metal plaque buried with him. In 1700, when his coffin was opened in order to move his remains to a newly built tomb, the metal plaque was discovered resting on his skeleton. On it was inscribed the date 1700.
