Most people are rather skeptical of the claims made by Nostradamus, having read his work in the original ancient French.
Nostradamus is best known for his book Les Propheties (“The Prophecies”), which was published in 1555.
It has been suggested convincingly that, as a politically active Protestant living during the Inquisitions, he was most often talking in code about contemporary occurrences instead of trying to predict future ones.
Regardless, his maddening obscurity has been interpreted after the fact in dozens of different ways.
It showed that if you’re obscure enough, put no time limit on your “predictions,” and have thousands of people reinterpreting and retranslating your words for centuries afterward, you can be an amazing psychic, too.