Medieval merchant prophecy predicts a bad year ahead

Medieval society was filled with mysterious manuscripts that predicted doom and gloom but the ‘Zibaldone da Canal’ isn’t just any old book of prophecies but rather a guidebook that happened to contain a way to predict the future. 

Written sometime in the fourteenth century by a Venetian merchant according to The Medievalist, the guidebook contained a lot of information historians have found enlightening. Everything from math questions to the best ports for business were written down in the book.  

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Canaletto

The Venetian merchant who created the ‘Zibaldone da Canal’ even filled it with proverbs that he thought would be good to remember, for example: “The wise man has his mouth in his heart, while the fool has his heart in his mouth.”

However, despite all the revealing tidbits on fourteenth-century life in Medieval Europe, the guidebook contained a far more interesting section for those interested in seeing how the future might unfold. But it’s not what you might think. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Gentile Bellini - The Yorck Project

When someone mentions predictions about the future from the Middle Ages, it's almost a fact of life that those listening will think about Nostradamus and his “predictions.” But the ‘Zibaldone da Canal’ isn’t like that and The Medievalist explained its predictive powers.

Included in the merchant’s book was a section explaining that what would happen in any year could be predicted based on the day of the week the first of January fell on. But how much stock should we put into these predictions?

January 1st, 2020, fell on a Wednesday and the merchant book predicted that years beginning on a Wednesday will have little grain but an abundance of honey and milk. Winter would be warm and spring damp with a temperate autumn.

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons Public Domain

The merchant's description sounds great but the Daily Star noted that years beginning on a Wednesday also faced “dysentery and great mortality of people” as well as famine, which sounds eerily familiar to the 2020 the world experienced. 

Winter in the northern hemisphere was the warmest ever on land at the time according to The Economist, and the world was also dealing with the worst global pandemic it had seen in over a century. So the merchant wasn't quite wrong. 

Photo by Ales Krivec on Unsplash

If 2020's predictions piqued your curiosity, and you’re interested to know what 2024 might hold for us, buckle up because it isn’t very good. January 1st fell on a Monday, meaning we can expect floods, sore throats, and mortality from iron! 

“If the first of January comes on a Monday, the winter will be ordinary, and the spring and summer will be temperate,” the merchant predicted according to the translation that was published by The Medievalist. But it takes a bad turn quickly. 

“There will be a great flood, and great illness, and there will be little honey and wine and grain, and there will be great cold and ice and there will be a great mortality from iron, and many people will die of sore throats,” the merchant continued. 

The Medievalist noted that even though the prediction wasn't very long, it contained a lot. We know what to expect from the weather, our food supply, and threats to our lives. "Mortality from iron" was an interesting phrase and one the online outlet said likely meant war with iron representing the swords and arrows of war from the period.

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Jean Froissart

Again, you might not think too much about what a fourteenth-century medieval merchant was predicting but a January 2nd map released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed influenza was on the rise in the US just before the new year. 

Photo Credit: enters for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Moreover, Europe is battling what the Financial Times called a "trifecta" of threats that it reported was pushing the continent's health systems to the limit with major upticks of sick people in Spain, Italy, Germany, France, and the UK.  Not quite sore throats but certainly worrying. 

Whether or not this means we should expect to see a major flood this year and a lot of deaths from war, isn’t known yet. But the world is in a very precarious geopolitical situation so the merchant's word just might ring true.