Page "Nostradamus" Paragraph 37

Most of the quatrains deal with disasters, such as plagues, earthquakes, wars, floods, invasions, murders, droughts, and battles — all undated and based on foreshadowings by the Mirabilis Liber.

Some quatrains cover these disasters in overall terms ; others concern a single person or small group of people.

Some cover a single town, others several towns in several countries.

A major, underlying theme is an impending invasion of Europe by Muslim forces from further east and south headed by the expected Antichrist, directly reflecting the then-current Ottoman invasions and the earlier Saracen equivalents, as well as the prior expectations of the Mirabilis Liber.

All of this is presented in the context of the supposedly imminent end of the world — even though this is not in fact mentioned – a conviction that sparked numerous collections of end-time prophecies at the time, not least an unpublished collection by Christopher Columbus.