When the astonished monk asked what on earth Nostradamus was doing, he replied, “I must yield myself and bow before his Holiness. ”

Nineteen years after the death of Nostradamus, that monk, Father Peretti, became Pope Sixtus V.

When Nostradamus’s travels ended, he remarried, this time to a wealthy widow with whom he had six children. They settled in Salon, France, and it was there that he began his prophetic writings.

His works had a very distinctive structure. He wrote in four- line verses, or quatrains. Then he organized the quatrains into what he called Centuries—one hundred quatrains per Century, although since he wrote a total of 942 quatrains in his lifetime, there was one Century that contained only forty-two quatrains.

As for his style, it can only be described as obscure. It was full of Greek and Latin and anagrams and odd, complicated plays on words. One school of thought is that his writings were deliberately vague so that they would be too hard to interpret for anyone to claim he was inaccurate. The truth is actually a distant relative of that theory: Nostradamus knew that he faced possible persecution, including torture or death, if he clearly revealed himself as a prophet. But if his works were obscure and confusing enough, no one could make an ironclad case against him for being a heretic seer in league with the devil. So the fact that debates continue to this day about the “real” interpretation of the Nostradamus quatrains is a testament to his ability to protect himself and the integrity of his prophecies.

It was one of Nostradamus’s less obscure quatrains that put him in great favor with the French royal family and elevated his status during his lifetime. The quatrain reads:

The young lion will overcome the older one On the field of combat in single battle. He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death.

A few short years after Nostradamus wrote those words, France’s King Henry II was killed during a jousting tournament when his opponent’s lance slipped through the “golden” face mask of the king’s helmet, piercing his eye. King Henry’s wife, Catherine d’ Medici, knew of Nostradamus’s prophecy about her husband, and after his death she regularly used Nostradamus as her personal consultant.

The prophecies of Nostradamus have been translated, dissected, analyzed, and interpreted by countless people in countless books, articles, and films. I can’t possibly do them justice here. But for the purpose of our discussion of the Apocalypse, there are several quatrains that lend themselves perfectly.

Nostradamus predicted that on the long road to the end of days, the world would see a rise to power of three antichrists who would terrorize and sadistically brutalize anyone who offered them less than blind, slavish loyalty.

His description of the first of these antichrists reads:

An Emperor shall be born near Italy

Who shall cost the Empire dear.

They shall say, with what people he keeps company,

He shall be found less a Prince than a butcher.

From a simple soldier he will rise to the Empire

From the short robe he will attain the long.

Great swarms of bees shall arise.

And, in a separate quatrain:

The captive prince, conquered, is sent to Elba;

He will sail across the Gulf of Genoa to Marseilles.

By a great effort of the foreign forces he is overcome,

Though he escaped the fire, his bees yield blood by the barrel.

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