Anonymous Medieval Writer
circa 1299 CE
trans. Jason Colavito
2026
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NOTE |
The Christian forgeries known as the Pseudo-Sibylline Oracles cast an enormous influence over the Late Antique and medieval worlds, and later writers would often imitate their style. The period of hostility in the later thirteenth century between the French and German monarchies over control of Italy, and the influence of the papacy in the conflict, gave rise to a resurgence in prophecy, including the anonymous oracular poem apparently composed sometime around 1299. The French historian Charles de Ribbe wrote a brief article about the medieval prophecy in 1878 and its historical background, including a scholarly reconstruction of what was described as a difficult Latin text marred by unclear abbreviations and amateurish writing. I have translated his essay below, with the addition of a literal translation of the Latin poem since his French translation was not entirely faithful. An abbreviated account, clearly condensed from Ribbe's article without citation, appeared in John Grand-Carteret's L’histoire, la vie, les moeurs et le curiosité, vol. 2 in 1927.
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A NOSTRADAMUS OF
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
Charles de Ribbe
Excerpted from the Eleventh Volume of the Mémoires de l’Académie d’Aix
AIX-EN-PROVENCE
CHEZ MARIUS LILY, IMPRIMEUR DE L’ACADÉMIE, 1878.
A Nostradamus of the Thirteenth Century
The Latin text that is the subject of this note was found on the parchment cover of a 14th-century cartulary, dated 1353, containing a number of documents drawn up in Aix-en-Provence by a notary of the time named Pascalis (or Pascal) de Bucot.
The first line, unlike the others, is quite easy to read, and it had caught the attention of Pascalis de Bucot’s learned successor, our contemporary, to whose study the register belongs; but, at the same time, it had offended his most serious and legitimate sensibilities. Gallorum levitas Germanum justificabit, which, translated literally into French, means: “The frivolity of the French will justify the German.” “What an opening! What a formula!” the excellent notary told us, sharing the text in question with us out of curiosity. “That’s a strange beginning. Could you decipher the rest? For, the rest of the document is beyond my paleographic knowledge.”
His request was not easy to fulfill. Aside from the Latin, which is extremely poor, the abbreviations render some words almost indecipherable, and the punctuation is completely lacking. Nevertheless, with the help of one of our learned and devoted colleagues from the Academy of Aix, Mr. Morizot, we were able to determine the content and meaning of the ten lines added to the opening one. It is an imitation of the ancient Sibylline oracles, a kind of prophecy; it comes to us from an unknown 13th-century Nostradamus (1); it concerns the struggles of the Priesthood against the Empire, and it directly addresses the role and destiny of the descendants of Charles of Anjou as instruments of French policy in Italy.
And first, here is the Latin text:
The first line, unlike the others, is quite easy to read, and it had caught the attention of Pascalis de Bucot’s learned successor, our contemporary, to whose study the register belongs; but, at the same time, it had offended his most serious and legitimate sensibilities. Gallorum levitas Germanum justificabit, which, translated literally into French, means: “The frivolity of the French will justify the German.” “What an opening! What a formula!” the excellent notary told us, sharing the text in question with us out of curiosity. “That’s a strange beginning. Could you decipher the rest? For, the rest of the document is beyond my paleographic knowledge.”
His request was not easy to fulfill. Aside from the Latin, which is extremely poor, the abbreviations render some words almost indecipherable, and the punctuation is completely lacking. Nevertheless, with the help of one of our learned and devoted colleagues from the Academy of Aix, Mr. Morizot, we were able to determine the content and meaning of the ten lines added to the opening one. It is an imitation of the ancient Sibylline oracles, a kind of prophecy; it comes to us from an unknown 13th-century Nostradamus (1); it concerns the struggles of the Priesthood against the Empire, and it directly addresses the role and destiny of the descendants of Charles of Anjou as instruments of French policy in Italy.
And first, here is the Latin text:
Gallorum levitas Germanum justificabit. |
The fickleness of the Gauls will justify the German.
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The following translation of these verses should not stray far from their true meaning:
The levity of the French will vindicate the German.
Italian gravity will disown the French, to their own confusion.
Around the year 1299,
The vanquished eagle will rise again, mighty.
The French will succumb; the world will worship the victorious banners of the eagle.
Rome will be under a worthy leader.
There will be an earthquake, which, it is conjectured, will have the following effects:
Constantine, you will fall, and so will fall the marble horses,
And the obelisk, and many Roman palaces.
The Pope will soon die. Caesar will reign everywhere,
And beneath him will vanish the vain power of the clergy.
Undoubtedly, such prophetic pronouncements defy all criticism, and a work of this kind does not deserve to be taken seriously. But it is worthwhile to investigate the circumstances under which it arose and gained credence, what its fundamental political significance was, and how, many years after the period indicated by the supposed prophet for the fulfillment of his prediction, it continued to occupy minds in Provence, to the point of being inscribed on the parchment of a notarial cartulary.
The imperial eagle, it is said, has been defeated. Now, on this point at least, we are in full knowledge; the fall and extinction of the House of Swabia are well known, and its repercussions throughout Europe are well known.
The struggles of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, against the papacy had had the most disastrous consequences for him. This prince, after having worked all his life to unite Germany, Italy, and the Two Sicilies, died in 1250 under the weight of the anathemas that had struck him, and his ambitious projects had been thwarted. When he disappeared from the scene, the Ghibellines suffered only a succession of setbacks. Mainfroi, his natural son, remained the ruler of the Two Sicilies; but he found a formidable adversary in the Count of Provence, Charles of Anjou, whom the Pope had called upon for help, and soon afterward he was defeated and killed at Benevento. Conradin, Frederick’s grandson, fared no better and perished on the scaffold. The Ghibelline party seemed lost: from the height of its power, it had fallen into oblivion, almost without hope of a reversal of fortune. The hour was decisive, and popular imaginations were deeply impressed by such a solemn and dramatic spectacle. A legend arose concerning the last representative of the imperial cause. An eagle, it was said in Naples, had been seen descending from the heavens to earth at the very moment Frederick II’s grandson was being martyred; it had dipped its right wing in his blood and then soared back into the air. What is certain is that Conradin had not wanted to let the fate of the Ghibelline party perish with him. From the scaffold, he had thrown his glove as a sign of investiture and a pledge of battle, and this glove, picked up by a knight, had been carried to Peter of Aragon. Now, such an event, occurring in similar circumstances, was the starting point for new political complications, and it had consequences that are too clearly marked in our prophetic text not to demand our full attention.
Peter III of Aragon was no ordinary man; History has given him the nickname of the Great, and indeed, from the day he succeeded his father James I (1276), he appeared as one of the most skillful and most feared princes, with whom his adversaries had to reckon.
He had married Constance, daughter of Mainfroi; he harbored plans for conquest and ideas of dominance that extended far beyond his small kingdom of Aragon. It is therefore no surprise that the Ghibelline party hailed him as the heir of Frederick II and placed all its hopes in the success of his claims. The fact is, as the historian Papon observed (1), that Constance’s claims were the foundation of those that the House of Aragon henceforth held over Naples and Sicily, and that they became the root cause of the wars by which Italy was ravaged for several centuries.
Thus, the House of Aragon came to embody, in the eyes of the Italians, the interests and the political banner of the House of Swabia. And now we must investigate what stimuli and what spirit of opposition these Italian passions, overflowing outwards, also exerted their influence on the other side of the Alps.
Let us consider the situation of Provence at the accession of Charles I of Anjou. Until then, it had been a major fief of the Empire, placed under the nominal suzerainty of the monarchs beyond the Rhine. The kings of Aragon possessed this fief; their line had been established there for over a century, and they were not dispossessed without experiencing a deep and bitter resentment. When Beatrice, daughter of Raymond Berenger III, had to choose a husband (1245), the claims to her hand, as has been said, took on the proportions of a lawsuit between the Holy Roman Empire and France, between the North and the South of Gaul, between the houses of Germany and France. “Emperor Frederick II, concerned with maintaining his suzerainty over the country, had sought the hand of the heiress for his nephew. France, having already married the Count of Poitiers, the King’s brother, to the heiress of Toulouse, now wished to marry the Count of Anjou, another brother of the King, to the heiress of Provence, doing for the benefit of the branches of its royal house what it could not so soon do for itself. King James I of Aragon, filled with sorrow at the sight of this ancient and important domain about to pass from his line, also offered his son… France had many enemies. ‘The Provençals,’ exclaimed a national poet, ‘seeing this momentous revolution approaching, instead of a brave lord, will have a sire; subjugated by the French, they will no longer bear lance or sword. Death rather than this affront.’” However, it was France that prevailed..... Charles, Count of Anjou, approached with the royal banners, and, having rebuffed the Prince of Aragon..., he married Beatrice before the end of 1245. Such was the end of the House of Aragon in Provence. It had yielded to the force of circumstances, but without relinquishing its desire for revenge.
Later, unexpected events unfolded; Charles intervened in Italy; he waged a relentless war against his rightful overlord, and he even went so far as to have Conradin executed by guillotine the day after the latter had been crowned emperor in Rome (1268). Then all the resentment he had encountered upon arriving in Provence resurfaced; he was accused of treachery; he was seen as the agent of an unrestrained and unscrupulous policy, which, not content with subjugating the country, engaged it in ruinous expeditions for the benefit of French interests. Charles of Anjou’s armies were Franco-Provençal armies; in reality, France was intervening directly in Italy under the leadership of the King’s brother, and it was thus that Ghibelline passions crossed the Alps to spread to Provence, or at least to the Aragonese party that still held sway there. We have just recounted how Peter III inherited Conradin’s rights, and it is not surprising to suppose that his claims aroused sympathy among the Provençals who had remained loyal to his family.
In all periods of upheaval, predictions have been propagated by the various warring parties, with the aim of inspiring blind faith in the masses. This was very common in the past, under the influence of customs that gave a prominent place to astrology. Nostradamus was no exception, and the 13th century yielded nothing in this respect to the 16th.
There is reason to believe that the reprisals carried out against the House of Anjou, ruler of Italy, contributed to emboldening these pseudo-prophets. Everyone knows how Sicily revolted against Charles in 1282; history tells us how, through secret plots hatched with the King of Aragon, John of Procida orchestrated the massacres of the Provençals and the French, known as the Sicilian Vespers. Peter III benefited from these horrific acts of vengeance. Welcomed with rapturous enthusiasm in Sicily, he had just received the crown when Pope Martin IV excommunicated him, proclaimed a crusade against him, and gave his kingdom of Aragon to Charles of Valois, second son of Philip the Bold, King of France.
The Ghibelline party, recently defeated, was reborn, and, despite the outcry it had just faced, it seemed to be gaining the upper hand. Charles, Prince of Salerno, son and heir of Charles I, had been taken prisoner in Sicily and was being held captive there. Robert of Artois, sent by Philip the Bold to aid the Provençals, had been unable to prevent them from evacuating the places they still occupied there.
Was it in these circumstances that the sibylline verses were written, the enigmatic text of which has been transmitted to us by the notarial cartulary of Pascalis de Bucot? We have no light on this matter, and the field is open to all interpretations. The pseudo-prophet announces that French frivolity will suffer sad reversals of fortune, that the French, initially welcomed as liberators, will be disowned, to their shame, and that the work of the German emperors will be vindicated. One is inclined to think that this must have been said in the aftermath of the Sicilian Vespers. But a date is fixed: the year 1299. Around that year, the unknown Nostradamus asserts, the eagle will rise again, great and glorious. Let us therefore seek to see if some memorable event actually occurred at that time.
In fact, what do we see?
In 1287, a treaty was concluded at Champfranc between Charles the Lame, restored to his freedom, and Alfonso of Aragon, son of Peter III. The former pledged to obtain from the King of France and Charles of Valois the abandonment of their alleged rights to Aragon, and the latter promised, for his part, to relinquish Sicily. In 1294, a new treaty was signed at Brignoles, confirming and supplementing that of Champfranc. However, the Sicilian people did not ratify this peace between the princes, and they placed Frederick, the third son of Constantius and Peter III, on the throne.
Frederick became the national leader of the Sicilian uprising. Against him fought Pope Boniface VIII and Charles II of Anjou; in him, the figures of Maimfre and Conradin seemed to still live on. These figures had disappeared, but their cause, that of the Ghibelline party, remained almost unchanged.
Is it Frederick’s enthronement in Sicily that the pseudo-prophet’s hopes refer to? We would not dare answer in the affirmative, and indeed everything suggests the contrary; for, in 1297, Charles II of Anjou had just married his son Robert, Duke of Calabria, to Yolande of Aragon in Rome, in the presence of James of Aragon, Procida, and Queen Constance—the very same queen who had witnessed her father, Mainfroi, her mother, and her brother, dethroned and put to death by Charles I. It is true that Frederick had been excluded from the peace treaty. Attacked by the French and the Aragonese, he had even won the great victory of Falconara against them in 1299. I would add that Frederick ultimately succeeded in retaining Sicily, and that his two sons reigned there successively, although legally it had reverted to the House of Anjou by a treaty signed in 1302. It was only later, in 1394, that Sicily returned to the Crown of Aragon through the marriage of Maria, a descendant of one of Frederick’s sons, to Martin, heir to the senior branch of his house.
In 1298, the coronation of Albert I of Austria as Holy Roman Emperor took place in Aachen, and contemporary chroniclers mention the extraordinary festivities that were held.
Could it have been on the occasion of this rebirth of the imperial eagle that the prophecy was made?
In any case, only one conclusion can be drawn from comparing our sibylline verses with the political situation at the end of the 13th century: they were composed under the influence of Ghibelline passions, unleashed against the French intervention in Italy, and were disseminated in Provence by the enemies of French rule.
The author was hostile to papal power; he declared himself a supporter of the Caesars, and he dreamed for them not only of absolute power in Italy, but of world domination. Destroying what he calls “the vain power of the clergy” is, in his eyes, progress. For this, he dares to invoke fire from heaven, or rather from hell; he predicts earthquakes; With the radicalism of a madman, he would see even the most beautiful palaces and monuments of Kome annihilated, and he seems to target the Arch of Constantine above all others, because no doubt it is in his eyes the symbol of the union of spiritual and temporal powers in the city of the popes, who were both pontiffs and kings.
We have already observed that such fantasies do not deserve to be taken seriously. Therefore, we have limited ourselves to investigating the reasons why they might have spread as far as Provence, and we believe our explanation is plausible. One difficult, not to say impossible, question remains to be answered: How did this 13th-century prophecy come to be written on the parchment cover of a notarial cartulary from 1353? Here, we refrain from venturing conjectures, as they would be entirely without foundation.
Let us simply point out a curious fact: on the same parchment, and below the sibylline verses, is a note in Latin, dated much later, which recalls one of the most disastrous events in our Provençal annals; we are referring to the capture of Marseille by the Aragonese in 1423. It almost seems like a postscript intended to confirm that the prophecy has been fulfilled, if not for Rome, at least for Marseille, in which was, in a way, the best part of Provençal life and independence.
Here the scene changes, and we find the second House of Anjou established in Provence. This house had tried in vain to reconquer the Kingdom of Naples, and what did it do to recover? It reconciled with the hereditary enemies of Charles I: Louis II married Yolande of Aragon.
It seemed that the embers of discord had been extinguished. But it was not to be, and it was said that the Angevin and Aragonese factions would be immortal in their hatred.
In 1423, the adoption of Louis III of Anjou by Joanna II, heiress to the Kingdom of Naples, brought the Count of Provence and the King of Aragon back into conflict. The latter had just been ousted; he had initially been chosen, but at the last moment he had alienated Joanna through his ingratitude.
He was returning to his own lands when, passing through Marseille, he decided to unleash the full force of his vengeance upon the city. He forced the harbor chain, set fire to the neighboring houses, igniting a blaze so intense that 4,000 houses were reduced to ashes, and left the rest of this great city to be pillaged.
The event is recorded on the cover of the cartulary of 1353, undoubtedly by a successor of Pascalis de Bucot, who had not lost sight of the curious Latin text containing the 13th-century prophecy. The note states that on the 20th of November, in the year 1423, a Saturday, the King of Aragon entered the port of Marseille with twenty-two galleys, vigenti duabus galeys, after breaking the port chain, scisa cathena dicti portus. It adds that he set fire to the city, fecit poni ignem huic, so that the fire spread as far as the hill, usque ad collam.
No reflection is required; the fact is noted without comment. It seems that the Aragonese reprisals and their savage attack on Marseille were very intentionally recorded, in addition to the predictions made long before, around the time of the Sicilian Vespers, against the French invaders of Italy.
The imperial eagle, it is said, has been defeated. Now, on this point at least, we are in full knowledge; the fall and extinction of the House of Swabia are well known, and its repercussions throughout Europe are well known.
The struggles of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, against the papacy had had the most disastrous consequences for him. This prince, after having worked all his life to unite Germany, Italy, and the Two Sicilies, died in 1250 under the weight of the anathemas that had struck him, and his ambitious projects had been thwarted. When he disappeared from the scene, the Ghibellines suffered only a succession of setbacks. Mainfroi, his natural son, remained the ruler of the Two Sicilies; but he found a formidable adversary in the Count of Provence, Charles of Anjou, whom the Pope had called upon for help, and soon afterward he was defeated and killed at Benevento. Conradin, Frederick’s grandson, fared no better and perished on the scaffold. The Ghibelline party seemed lost: from the height of its power, it had fallen into oblivion, almost without hope of a reversal of fortune. The hour was decisive, and popular imaginations were deeply impressed by such a solemn and dramatic spectacle. A legend arose concerning the last representative of the imperial cause. An eagle, it was said in Naples, had been seen descending from the heavens to earth at the very moment Frederick II’s grandson was being martyred; it had dipped its right wing in his blood and then soared back into the air. What is certain is that Conradin had not wanted to let the fate of the Ghibelline party perish with him. From the scaffold, he had thrown his glove as a sign of investiture and a pledge of battle, and this glove, picked up by a knight, had been carried to Peter of Aragon. Now, such an event, occurring in similar circumstances, was the starting point for new political complications, and it had consequences that are too clearly marked in our prophetic text not to demand our full attention.
Peter III of Aragon was no ordinary man; History has given him the nickname of the Great, and indeed, from the day he succeeded his father James I (1276), he appeared as one of the most skillful and most feared princes, with whom his adversaries had to reckon.
He had married Constance, daughter of Mainfroi; he harbored plans for conquest and ideas of dominance that extended far beyond his small kingdom of Aragon. It is therefore no surprise that the Ghibelline party hailed him as the heir of Frederick II and placed all its hopes in the success of his claims. The fact is, as the historian Papon observed (1), that Constance’s claims were the foundation of those that the House of Aragon henceforth held over Naples and Sicily, and that they became the root cause of the wars by which Italy was ravaged for several centuries.
Thus, the House of Aragon came to embody, in the eyes of the Italians, the interests and the political banner of the House of Swabia. And now we must investigate what stimuli and what spirit of opposition these Italian passions, overflowing outwards, also exerted their influence on the other side of the Alps.
Let us consider the situation of Provence at the accession of Charles I of Anjou. Until then, it had been a major fief of the Empire, placed under the nominal suzerainty of the monarchs beyond the Rhine. The kings of Aragon possessed this fief; their line had been established there for over a century, and they were not dispossessed without experiencing a deep and bitter resentment. When Beatrice, daughter of Raymond Berenger III, had to choose a husband (1245), the claims to her hand, as has been said, took on the proportions of a lawsuit between the Holy Roman Empire and France, between the North and the South of Gaul, between the houses of Germany and France. “Emperor Frederick II, concerned with maintaining his suzerainty over the country, had sought the hand of the heiress for his nephew. France, having already married the Count of Poitiers, the King’s brother, to the heiress of Toulouse, now wished to marry the Count of Anjou, another brother of the King, to the heiress of Provence, doing for the benefit of the branches of its royal house what it could not so soon do for itself. King James I of Aragon, filled with sorrow at the sight of this ancient and important domain about to pass from his line, also offered his son… France had many enemies. ‘The Provençals,’ exclaimed a national poet, ‘seeing this momentous revolution approaching, instead of a brave lord, will have a sire; subjugated by the French, they will no longer bear lance or sword. Death rather than this affront.’” However, it was France that prevailed..... Charles, Count of Anjou, approached with the royal banners, and, having rebuffed the Prince of Aragon..., he married Beatrice before the end of 1245. Such was the end of the House of Aragon in Provence. It had yielded to the force of circumstances, but without relinquishing its desire for revenge.
Later, unexpected events unfolded; Charles intervened in Italy; he waged a relentless war against his rightful overlord, and he even went so far as to have Conradin executed by guillotine the day after the latter had been crowned emperor in Rome (1268). Then all the resentment he had encountered upon arriving in Provence resurfaced; he was accused of treachery; he was seen as the agent of an unrestrained and unscrupulous policy, which, not content with subjugating the country, engaged it in ruinous expeditions for the benefit of French interests. Charles of Anjou’s armies were Franco-Provençal armies; in reality, France was intervening directly in Italy under the leadership of the King’s brother, and it was thus that Ghibelline passions crossed the Alps to spread to Provence, or at least to the Aragonese party that still held sway there. We have just recounted how Peter III inherited Conradin’s rights, and it is not surprising to suppose that his claims aroused sympathy among the Provençals who had remained loyal to his family.
In all periods of upheaval, predictions have been propagated by the various warring parties, with the aim of inspiring blind faith in the masses. This was very common in the past, under the influence of customs that gave a prominent place to astrology. Nostradamus was no exception, and the 13th century yielded nothing in this respect to the 16th.
There is reason to believe that the reprisals carried out against the House of Anjou, ruler of Italy, contributed to emboldening these pseudo-prophets. Everyone knows how Sicily revolted against Charles in 1282; history tells us how, through secret plots hatched with the King of Aragon, John of Procida orchestrated the massacres of the Provençals and the French, known as the Sicilian Vespers. Peter III benefited from these horrific acts of vengeance. Welcomed with rapturous enthusiasm in Sicily, he had just received the crown when Pope Martin IV excommunicated him, proclaimed a crusade against him, and gave his kingdom of Aragon to Charles of Valois, second son of Philip the Bold, King of France.
The Ghibelline party, recently defeated, was reborn, and, despite the outcry it had just faced, it seemed to be gaining the upper hand. Charles, Prince of Salerno, son and heir of Charles I, had been taken prisoner in Sicily and was being held captive there. Robert of Artois, sent by Philip the Bold to aid the Provençals, had been unable to prevent them from evacuating the places they still occupied there.
Was it in these circumstances that the sibylline verses were written, the enigmatic text of which has been transmitted to us by the notarial cartulary of Pascalis de Bucot? We have no light on this matter, and the field is open to all interpretations. The pseudo-prophet announces that French frivolity will suffer sad reversals of fortune, that the French, initially welcomed as liberators, will be disowned, to their shame, and that the work of the German emperors will be vindicated. One is inclined to think that this must have been said in the aftermath of the Sicilian Vespers. But a date is fixed: the year 1299. Around that year, the unknown Nostradamus asserts, the eagle will rise again, great and glorious. Let us therefore seek to see if some memorable event actually occurred at that time.
In fact, what do we see?
In 1287, a treaty was concluded at Champfranc between Charles the Lame, restored to his freedom, and Alfonso of Aragon, son of Peter III. The former pledged to obtain from the King of France and Charles of Valois the abandonment of their alleged rights to Aragon, and the latter promised, for his part, to relinquish Sicily. In 1294, a new treaty was signed at Brignoles, confirming and supplementing that of Champfranc. However, the Sicilian people did not ratify this peace between the princes, and they placed Frederick, the third son of Constantius and Peter III, on the throne.
Frederick became the national leader of the Sicilian uprising. Against him fought Pope Boniface VIII and Charles II of Anjou; in him, the figures of Maimfre and Conradin seemed to still live on. These figures had disappeared, but their cause, that of the Ghibelline party, remained almost unchanged.
Is it Frederick’s enthronement in Sicily that the pseudo-prophet’s hopes refer to? We would not dare answer in the affirmative, and indeed everything suggests the contrary; for, in 1297, Charles II of Anjou had just married his son Robert, Duke of Calabria, to Yolande of Aragon in Rome, in the presence of James of Aragon, Procida, and Queen Constance—the very same queen who had witnessed her father, Mainfroi, her mother, and her brother, dethroned and put to death by Charles I. It is true that Frederick had been excluded from the peace treaty. Attacked by the French and the Aragonese, he had even won the great victory of Falconara against them in 1299. I would add that Frederick ultimately succeeded in retaining Sicily, and that his two sons reigned there successively, although legally it had reverted to the House of Anjou by a treaty signed in 1302. It was only later, in 1394, that Sicily returned to the Crown of Aragon through the marriage of Maria, a descendant of one of Frederick’s sons, to Martin, heir to the senior branch of his house.
In 1298, the coronation of Albert I of Austria as Holy Roman Emperor took place in Aachen, and contemporary chroniclers mention the extraordinary festivities that were held.
Could it have been on the occasion of this rebirth of the imperial eagle that the prophecy was made?
In any case, only one conclusion can be drawn from comparing our sibylline verses with the political situation at the end of the 13th century: they were composed under the influence of Ghibelline passions, unleashed against the French intervention in Italy, and were disseminated in Provence by the enemies of French rule.
The author was hostile to papal power; he declared himself a supporter of the Caesars, and he dreamed for them not only of absolute power in Italy, but of world domination. Destroying what he calls “the vain power of the clergy” is, in his eyes, progress. For this, he dares to invoke fire from heaven, or rather from hell; he predicts earthquakes; With the radicalism of a madman, he would see even the most beautiful palaces and monuments of Kome annihilated, and he seems to target the Arch of Constantine above all others, because no doubt it is in his eyes the symbol of the union of spiritual and temporal powers in the city of the popes, who were both pontiffs and kings.
We have already observed that such fantasies do not deserve to be taken seriously. Therefore, we have limited ourselves to investigating the reasons why they might have spread as far as Provence, and we believe our explanation is plausible. One difficult, not to say impossible, question remains to be answered: How did this 13th-century prophecy come to be written on the parchment cover of a notarial cartulary from 1353? Here, we refrain from venturing conjectures, as they would be entirely without foundation.
Let us simply point out a curious fact: on the same parchment, and below the sibylline verses, is a note in Latin, dated much later, which recalls one of the most disastrous events in our Provençal annals; we are referring to the capture of Marseille by the Aragonese in 1423. It almost seems like a postscript intended to confirm that the prophecy has been fulfilled, if not for Rome, at least for Marseille, in which was, in a way, the best part of Provençal life and independence.
Here the scene changes, and we find the second House of Anjou established in Provence. This house had tried in vain to reconquer the Kingdom of Naples, and what did it do to recover? It reconciled with the hereditary enemies of Charles I: Louis II married Yolande of Aragon.
It seemed that the embers of discord had been extinguished. But it was not to be, and it was said that the Angevin and Aragonese factions would be immortal in their hatred.
In 1423, the adoption of Louis III of Anjou by Joanna II, heiress to the Kingdom of Naples, brought the Count of Provence and the King of Aragon back into conflict. The latter had just been ousted; he had initially been chosen, but at the last moment he had alienated Joanna through his ingratitude.
He was returning to his own lands when, passing through Marseille, he decided to unleash the full force of his vengeance upon the city. He forced the harbor chain, set fire to the neighboring houses, igniting a blaze so intense that 4,000 houses were reduced to ashes, and left the rest of this great city to be pillaged.
The event is recorded on the cover of the cartulary of 1353, undoubtedly by a successor of Pascalis de Bucot, who had not lost sight of the curious Latin text containing the 13th-century prophecy. The note states that on the 20th of November, in the year 1423, a Saturday, the King of Aragon entered the port of Marseille with twenty-two galleys, vigenti duabus galeys, after breaking the port chain, scisa cathena dicti portus. It adds that he set fire to the city, fecit poni ignem huic, so that the fire spread as far as the hill, usque ad collam.
No reflection is required; the fact is noted without comment. It seems that the Aragonese reprisals and their savage attack on Marseille were very intentionally recorded, in addition to the predictions made long before, around the time of the Sicilian Vespers, against the French invaders of Italy.
Source: Charles de Ribbe, Un Nostradamus du XIIIme siècle (Aix-en-Provence: Chez Marius Lily, Imprimeur de l’Académie, 1878).
