Nostradamus and the King of Terror — the dreaded month came and went

In the closing years of the 20th century, a single four-line verse attributed to the 16th-century French seer Nostradamus was promoted across books, magazines, and television as a forecast that something terrible — a “great King of Terror” descending from the sky — would arrive in the seventh month of 1999. The verse, known to enthusiasts as Century 10, Quatrain 72, was read by popular interpreters as a prediction of war, an Antichrist, or the end of the world. July 1999 passed without any such event. The most widely cited target dates came and went uneventfully, and the prophecy joined the long catalogue of Nostradamian readings that are clear only in hindsight.

Michel de Nostredame (1503–1566), a French apothecary and astrologer who Latinized his name to Nostradamus, published Les Prophéties in 1555 — hundreds of deliberately obscure quatrains crammed with archaic French, Latin, anagrams, and ambiguous imagery. That obscurity is the engine of his reputation. Verses vague enough to mean almost anything can be matched, after the fact, to almost any event, and Nostradamus has accordingly been credited with foreseeing Napoleon, Hitler, and other calamities once they had already occurred.

The 1999 quatrain was unusual in one respect: it appeared to name a date. “L’an mil neuf cens nonante neuf sept mois” — “the year 1999, seven months” — gave doom-watchers a fixed deadline, and a thriving paranormal-publishing industry seized on it. The English writer Erika Cheetham, among the best-known popularizers, read the obscure word “Angolmois” as an anagram for “Mongols” and cast the verse as the coming of a third Antichrist after Napoleon and Hitler. Television specials and a flood of books amplified the dread as the date approached.

Scholars who actually worked from the original 1555 printing told a different story. The dramatic phrase “King of Terror” rests on a contested reading — early editions print “deffraieur,” meaning something closer to a defrayer or spendthrift, not “d’effrayeur,” “of terror.” The English Nostradamus specialist Peter Lemesurier dismissed the panic outright, calling it “a disgrace” and noting the verse described no identifiable event at all. When July ended without catastrophe, interpreters did what they had always done: they slid the meaning onto other happenings and moved on.