Born in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France, Michel de Nostredame was one of at least nine children of Reynière de St-Rémy and Jaume de Nostredame. At the age of fifteen the young Nostredame entered the University of Avignon to study for his baccalaureate. After little more than a year he was forced to leave Avignon when the university closed its doors in the face of an outbreak of the plague. In 1529, after some years as an apothecary, he entered the University of Montpellier to study for a doctorate in medicine. He was expelled shortly afterwards when it was discovered that he had been an apothecary, a "manual trade" expressly banned by the university statutes.

In 1531 Nostredame was invited by Jules-César Scaliger, a leading Renaissance scholar, to come to Agen. There he married a woman of uncertain name (possibly Henriette d'Encausse), who bore him two children. In 1534 his wife and children died, presumably from the Plague. After their death, he continued to travel, passing through France and possibly Italy. Finally, in 1547, he settled in Salon-de-Provence in the house which exists today, where he married a rich widow named Anne Ponsarde, with whom he had six children — three daughters and three sons.

In 1550 he wrote an almanac, for the first time Latinizing his name from Nostredame to Nostradamus. He was so encouraged by the almanac's success that he decided to write one or more annually. Taken together, they are known to have contained at least 6,338 prophecies. Persons from far away soon started asking for horoscopes and 'psychic' advice from him. He then began his project of writing a book of one thousand mainly French quatrains, which constitute the largely undated prophecies for which he is most famous today. The quatrains were then published in a book titled Les Propheties (The Prophecies).

By 1566, Nostradamus's gout, which had plagued him painfully for many years and made movement very difficult, turned into edema. On the evening of July 1, he is alleged to have told his secretary Jean de Chavigny, "You will not find me alive at sunrise." The next morning he was reportedly found dead, lying on the floor next to his bed and a bench. He was buried in the local Franciscan chapel but re-interred in the Collégiale St-Laurent at the French Revolution, where his tomb remains to this day.

The Prophecies - In this book he collected his major, long-term divinations. The first edition was published in 1555. The second, with 289 further prophetic verses, was printed in 1557. The third edition, with three hundred new quatrains, was reportedly printed in 1558, but nowadays only survives as part of the omnibus edition that was published after his death in 1568. Thanks to printing practices at the time, no two editions turned out to be identical, and it is relatively rare to find even two copies exactly the same.

The Almanacs - By far the most popular of his works, these were published annually from 1550 until his death. Often he published two or even three in a single year, entitled either Almanachs (detailed predictions), Prognostications or Presages (more generalised predictions).

Nostradamus claimed to base his published predictions on judicial astrology — the astrological assessment of the 'quality' of expected future developments. recent research has shown that most of his prophetic work was based on paraphrasing collections of ancient end-of-the-world prophecies (mainly Bible-based) and supplementing their insights by projecting known historical events and identifiable anthologies of omen-reports into the future.

One of his most popular predictions concerning 9/11:

In the City of God there will be a great thunder,
Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures,
the great leader will succumb,
The third big war will begin when the big city is burning.