Nostradamus

For centuries, Nostradamus has been hailed as the man who saw the future—his cryptic quatrains allegedly foretelling everything from the French Revolution and the rise of Hitler to the 9/11 attacks and the Covid-19 pandemic. But how much is true, and how much is myth? Joining Dan in this episode to unravel the true history of the French soothsayer is John Hogue, a renowned Nostradamus scholar. Together they explore Nostradamus' life as a plague doctor, the occult during the Renaissance, his most famous predictions and why they still captivate us today. You can learn more on John's website here: http://www.hogueprophecy.com/ With special thanks to listener Tamarah Palmer. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear from you. You can email the podcast at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 1:03Speaker 01

  Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it healthy optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying, again and again, until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at optum.com.

• 1:32Speaker 02

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• 2:15Speaker 02

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• 2:26Dan Snow?

  Bienvenidos a todos, bienvenidos a Dan Snow's History Hit. Imagina un mundo sin aceptación amplia del método científico. Un mundo en el que las opiniones y ideas fueron formadas por los silbidos, mitos y supersticiones y predecesores. ¿No sería así? Imagina un mundo donde la medicina es parte de la oración y parte de la cura de la gente, y parte de algo un poco más oscuro.

• 2:55Dan Snow?

  Imagina este mundo dominado por la iglesia medieval con una perspectiva del mundo prescriptiva. Ese es el mundo hacia el que vamos hoy, amigos. Vamos de vuelta a la Renaissance en este episodio para hablar de una de sus figuras más coloridas. Ahora, la palabra Renaissance puede significarte a ti un tiempo de arte y ciencia que se está volviendo más floreciente, pero esta es una historia sobre una Europa Renaissance muy diferente. Esta es una historia sobre la magia, el oculto, la alquimia, la astrología que atrapó a la gente en la Renaissance. Fue un momento en el que nuestra línea entre lo que podríamos llamar ciencia y lo que ellos llamaban la magia natural se volvió confusa hasta el punto de no existir en absoluto.

• 3:40Dan Snow?

  Y este es el mundo de Nostradamus.

• 3:50Dan Snow?

  Quien en tiempos muy inciertos parecía proporcionar píxeles del futuro, una fuente de guía. Nostradamus era un sanador, era un doctor, peleó contra la plaga y otras enfermedades, tuvo algún éxito y lo hizo al abrazar algunas ideas modernas. Y creo que si no fuera por su carrera de escritura posterior, podría ser recordado, tal vez solo por los académicos, pero todavía recordado como un importante practicante médico. Pero luego se metió en la profecía.

• 4:21Dan Snow?

  Some believed he was a complete fake, others thought he was insane, others a heretic. But he became a huge figure of the age. He was protected from the church, he was favoured by the French queen Catherine de Medici. She was one of his biggest fans. She invited him to court, took after members of the family and do her children's horoscopes. Well, he made predictions about the future. Well, you can look them up. Some are absurdly vague. "Bad things will happen to France", kind of vague. "All of them are open to enormous interpretation", he wrote in a very cryptic fashion. And many of his interpreters have been very generous to him over the centuries, as you'll hear here.

• 5:06Dan Snow?

  But plenty of people at the time and since have been impressed by their prescience. I must say, I am a fan of his OG, his original and most famous prediction. He called the death of the French king Henry II, the husband of Catherine, who I mentioned. In 1555, he wrote his book, Les Prophecies. And he wrote, "The young lion will overcome the older one. On the field of combat in a single battle, he will pierce his eyes through a golden cage. Two wounds become one, and he dies a cruel death." Four years later, in 1559, Henry II lined up in a jousting tournament against the much younger Count of Montgomery.

• 5:48Dan Snow?

  During that joust, Montgomery's lance splintered and it pierced Henry II's eye through the helmet's visor, as he also sustained a crushing blow to the back of the head. Two wounds become one. He suffered terribly for 10 days before dying on July 10, 1559, and he dies a cruel death.

• 6:11Dan Snow?

  Nostradamus's prophecy seemingly fulfilled. Well, his contemporaries certainly thought so. With that, his career was made and people have been poring over every word he wrote ever since. And if you are into it, then friends buckle up because he saw in our future global thermonuclear war, interstellar settlement and the sun swallowing the earth. So choose your own adventure there. I've always wanted to know more about the man at the heart of this furore. I wasn't alone because we had a request from listener Tamara Palmer. She's in Victoria, Australia. So hello Tamara. And we were thrilled over here at History to make it happen. We found the world's greatest authority on Nostradamus and he's right here on the podcast now.

• 6:55Dan Snow?

  He's John Hoag, a leading expert. He's written several books on the subject, including Nostradamus: A Life and Myth. So whatever you think of the prophecy, folks, here's the history. Enjoy.

• 7:26Dan Snow?

  John, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  Glad to be here.

• 7:30Dan Snow?

  Tell me about the very specific context in which Nostradamus is born and in which he grows up. This idea of, well, forced conversion and what it was like to be Jewish in this period.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  He was born in 1503 in Provence, in Salini. And it was ruled until 1480 by King Rene the Good. He was called the Good because he was a very enlightened king, Saracens and Jews. And as Provence has always been a great doorway to the Mediterranean world, he was growing up in a beautiful space of that. But then Rene's son, the Duke of Calabria, was poisoned and that line was ended. And then it went over to Charles VIII of France. First Charles said, no more Jews, you either convert or go. But his son Louis XII made it very clear that you will suffer severe penalties.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  So they loved Provence and so they decided to go underground with their Judaism and become Christians.

• 8:30Dan Snow?

  Wow, fascinating. And this would have been, well, the entire community would have had to make that decision. That's extraordinary. He presented as a Christian and he was able then to study and have a career, I guess, which should have been denied to him as a Jew.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Well, it's interesting how so many Christianized Jews ended up being doctors. And his love for astrology also, he had the gift that his family had. His grandfathers were his teachers at first, and then he went to Avignon to do high school, I guess you would say. And then he also had a passion. He was a proto-botanist. That is why later in his life, he ended up running into Scaliger in Agon and becoming kind of a disciple of Scaliger, who was considered by history a proto-botanist. So he said, I want to search the world and wander through Paris as an apothecary.

• 9:20Dan Snow?

  So he was an apothecary, so he distributed drugs, he was a medical man, and he's obsessed with plants. I guess those two are very closely connected, and the properties of plants, but also the planets as well. And is this typical of a sort of Renaissance scientific life?

• 9:37Speaker 03

  He was truly a Renaissance man in the High French Renaissance period. He also made cosmetics. He also wrote his book, The Treatise on Pharmacies, Pharmacists, where he chronicled his journeys all over France, Lorraine, Southern Germany, Spain, and Italy, northern parts of Italy, especially in Florence, where he got a lot of his equipment, I think, for his magical studies. So it was his day job to be a doctor.

• 10:07Dan Snow?

  So that's interesting. You say they were all astrologers and then stargazers. I guess that's what, because early astronomy, the interest was how the movements of these planets and stars affect us down on Earth?

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Yes. It was permitted for a doctor to use astrology. And that's his way in to making it his living and also use it. He was a remarkable judicial astrologer, is what they used to call it in those days. That would be what we would call political or mundane astrology, reading the world, nations, the lifetimes of nations, people. And that's how he structured his prophecies through a lot of astrology.

• 10:42Dan Snow?

  I just want to ask a bit more about his work as a medicine man because the plague was still sending successive waves across Europe as it had been doing since the 14th century. He was able to treat the plague, was he, using slightly more effective techniques than had been tried in previous centuries?

• 11:00Speaker 03

  The great outbreak that happened in his day was in 1546, 1547, the bubonic plague. It was very severe. After great floods had sent lots of animals and people down the rung, and then the pestilence came from that, he thought. And so he was asked by the city fathers of the capital to go there and help them. He got there, all the doctors had fled or died. He set up with a couple of apothecaries in the Hotel de Ville, and for the next 270 days, he fought the plague, single-handed. The main thing was that he was very big on hiding, clean water, good food, no bad smells.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  He was very much about, you gotta stay away, be six feet away from people.

• 11:47Dan Snow?

  So you got that bit right?

• 11:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, he did. Everybody had an idea that hygiene was important, that there seems to be rats whenever there's plague, so let's kill the rats. And they didn't know about the fleas. But he had a lozenge that he gave people, a rose lozenge with roses and pine and things. It was more a placebo to help people. But, you know, he sequestered people, nobody gathering in groups, just like what we do now, knowing about germs.

• 12:16Dan Snow?

  So he does some interesting progressive things with this Aix-en-Provence outbreak of plague. Is he by this stage getting quite famous across France, across Western Europe, just for his medical work? Is he celebrated?

• 12:28Speaker 03

  Yes, you know, if Nostradamus had never written a word of prophecy, he would have gone down as one of the famous plague battlers of history. Because he didn't just stay at Aix-en-Provence, he then went to Salon Provence and did a similar work there and fell in love with the town. But then he was summoned up to Lyon to fight Woupingco. And so, yes, he was getting well-known.

• 12:53Dan Snow?

  So alongside his medical work, presumably seen as part of his medical work, is the occult. What did the world of the occult mean to the European elite, the French elite in this period?

• 13:03Speaker 03

  The term occult means hidden, hidden secrets.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  So it's been a thread throughout all periods of history. And the Renaissance was an interesting crossroads, where classical knowledge was being regenerated in interest, the classics. That's what the Renaissance means. And so all things of the classical Roman or the Hellenistic world, or even the Middle East, was also included. They all come up. And of course, one of the things that happened that was open in the times of Rome and the times of Greece, ancient Greece, were seers. The oracle of Delphi was a mainstream thing. So it was not a hidden thing.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  So it has, in history, a long legacy of resistance to the reactive Christian conversions of things that wants to suppress it. When you suppress something, it only makes it stronger. But it makes it secret. And that fundamentally is what the occult sciences are. They were also pursued, as was alchemy during the Renaissance. But alchemy played it interestingly. They kept people at bay by saying, "We're trying to make base metal into gold." And playing on the greed of more unconscious people, royals down to the lower people, the peasants, were all interested in,

• 14:36Speaker 03

  "Oh, well, continue that and keep in touch with us." So that we can also have the Midas touch without the curse. But what it really was, was a mystical group that were taking the base metal of your ego, of your subconscious, of your lower ideas, and to turn it into the gold of enlightenment. So the alchemy was about the soul, not about making gold.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Becoming the potential that every soul has.

• 15:09Dan Snow?

  So Nostradamus is dabbling in the occult, but sort of keeping it on the down low. But he publishes these prophecies. What led to the publication of that book?

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Nostradamus's journey as the most famous prophet all around the world started with this quatrain that actually foresaw in 1554 the jousting accident and the details of what happened to the king, which was the cause for the wars of religion, which were why he was writing these prophecies to prevent it.

• 15:44Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. It's all about Nostradamus. More coming up.

• 15:52Dan Snow?

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• 16:36Speaker 02

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• 17:18Speaker 02

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• 17:25Speaker 01

  Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it healthy optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying again and again until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at optum.com.

• 17:56Speaker 04

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• 18:34Dan Snow?

  And this book of prophecies ends up on the desk of the Queen of France?

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. The Queen of France was a Medici, Catherine de Medici. She was deeply involved in occult study. So she advised the royal censors. No book could be published in France unless the king's censor approved it and stamped it. So she would made sure that if any a book on the occult came through, that she was the first person to read it. So it's quite possible that the first person to read Le Prophtie, The Prophecies of Master Thomas, was her. And what she saw not too long into it was

• 19:22Speaker 03

  Quatreaine treize de l'année une. And she thought that this was about her husband, King Henry II. It starts by saying, "The young lion will overcome the old one on the field of combat in single battle. He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage, two wounds made one, then to die a cruel death." The young lion is the Count de Montgomery, Gabriel de Lorgia. He's doing a joust, the final joust. And these jousts were done, a big tournament in the Rue de Tornelle. And it was a big jousting thing with the members of the Spanish court.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  And because of the big peace treaty that ended the Italian-French wars. And wives were going to be given by proxy as well. And it was a big thing for them. So he was going to joust, in a three-day joust, at the end of June 1559. When sundown was coming, he said, "No, I want one more joust." They broke some jousting sticks and he wanted to go at de Lorgia one more time. And so he did. And then de Lorgia had a problem. He didn't lower his jousting stick just right. It hit the corasse of the king and a big splinter slid up and passed through the gilded cage of his helmet, piercing him right here.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  The eye survived, but the retina nerve was destroyed. This big splinter, it was like this huge stick of wood. Everybody was screaming, the queen fainted. He somehow managed to get himself up and get to his bed in the Chateau Tornelle and laid there. They had, Gabriel Pare was his physician, one of the great physicians of the 16th century. And they tried to save him, but the wounds were two. What had happened is, the wound one was the one that hit his eye. Wound two was the counter shock that fractured his skull from the back end and he got infection. And so 10 days later, he died in agony.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  What then happened that night is a great mob gathered outside of Paris to the Roman Inquisition offices, and they were carrying effigies, and they were very demanding of the peoples. They walked out on the stairs in the firelight to see effigies of Nostradamus, and they're saying, "We want you to burn this man." But fortunately for him, he was already back 300 miles or so back in Provence.

• 21:57Dan Snow?

  So he becomes super famous at that point because he seems to have prophesied this death?

• 22:01Speaker 03

  What alerted Catherine de Medici even more was that the Medici family back in Florence had an astrologer that they very much respected called Luc Gerikus. And he had also written her a message months before of his concern, looking at the stars of Henry II, that he might find himself in 1559 in an accident with jousting, and he should quit jousting, or not joust in the year 1559. So hundreds of miles south in South France, Nostradamus is writing about it, way off in distant Florence, another great prophet of the era is writing about it.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  The two never knew each other. So she said to her husband, Henry II, "I want to see this Nostradamus, this doctor from Southern France, and have him have an audience with you." And he said, "Okay." So send this Nostradamus fellow. Now, it usually took three months for anybody to ride a horse or a bumpy carriage to get to Paris. She made sure that he had the Royal Liberty stallions to harness his coach. So it only took one month. When he got there, he went to the Ely France, he went and prayed for his life in mass in the Notre Dame, named after him.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  And he then went to his hotel, but he was telling his publishers when he stopped over in Lyon that he was afraid he was going to lose his head, you know, he was very afraid of what would happen. And on the morning, he was going to have his audience at the Palace of Saint Germain-en-Vie. Outside of Paris at that time, he hears a knock on the door and he opens the door of his hotel room and there is the Constable of France, Anne de Montmorency, who was in a lot of his prophecies, his future and his fate during the wars of revolution between Catholics and Protestants. Big, strapping man. He was pushing seventy, he looked like

• 24:10Speaker 03

  thirty or forty, and he was the man, the commander of all forces of France who escorted him to the palace. No, he walked by all the people and they were making the usual things that people sneer at, even to this day, about people who work in this kind of field. And he just was very polite. He was always a very polite man. And he went in to the audience. He came out with his head on, his shoulders, and with several hundred crowns, crown gold coins, which unfortunately wouldn't pay for the only half of the journey. So he had to do astrologies while he was there in Paris to make out the nupi to go home.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  But what happened after that, he was invited to the Chateauois in the beautiful Wa countryside, which was the summer resort for Catherine de Medici. And there he drew charts, astrology charts, for all of her children. He liked Margot the best, but she ended up being Lorraine Margot in the infamous Saint Marc Allomute massacre, which he also predicted.

• 25:21Dan Snow?

  Now that we're talking about the prophecies, tell me about some of the other ones he made that you feel have, well, come to pass?

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Yes. One of the most interesting ones is a prose prophecy, which he wrote and finished, signed off in March of 1558. He saw the French Revolution coming. He called it the advent of the commoners, the vulgars, you know, the commoners, the peasants, because he is a royalist, true and true. So he's telling Henry II that there will become a great persecution when this happens, the Christian church. So he was already foreseeing how the churches would be closed down and taken by the French Revolution. And he says

• 26:05Speaker 03

  they will feel in that time that it's a new era. And so they'll create a calendar and it would be in the year 1792.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Now, he's a little wrong about the churches being ransacked. That happened a little earlier, but the First Republic created a revolutionary calendar in 1792.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  So that's one. There are hundreds like this. Not many, I got to say, to qualify. So many of them are open to interpretation because either they're wrong or they're about things that could have happened, but will never happen because he talked about alternative futures. So a lot of them may never happen. So some of the others, they're just wowers are, you know, his prophecies about the three Antichrists. He saw three. No one else in prophecy sees three, but he saw three. One he called Napoléon Wa, which is from Paul N. Laurent, which is an anagram. And Napoléon Wa is Napoleon Wa, King Napoleon.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  So he wrote, "Paul N. Laurent, King Napoleon, will be more of fire than of the blood. To swim in praise, the great one to flee to the confluence." Now that's the pious Pope Pius VI, who was arrested by the French Revolution. And of course, he had a lot to do with it because he basically conquered Italy for the French Revolution. Because the next line, he says, "The piouses, the piouses, the magpies." These are the two popes. Entry will be refused. The depraved Durance will keep them imprisoned. It was near Durance that the first pious, Pope Pius VI, died. And the other, of course, was denied his freedom.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  He was sent to the Fontainebleau Château by Emperor Napoleon, and he stayed there for many years as his guest.

• 28:06Dan Snow?

  People like to think he predicted the atomic bombs.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  Yes, he said, "There would be a terrible scourge that would hit two harbors, a scourge unlike any that had been seen before, and it had an invisible plague from within." And he was horrified. He was absolutely horrified by this. And of course, it's also some of his future prophecies see that we're not out of danger of that. The great flying fleets that use the dreadful globes, that's a nuclear trigger, fission trigger, over the fusion, and make the sun and the earth. And the fires will march up from the south. Well, that's usually where nuclear weapons land, the first that would be from south going north,

• 28:53Speaker 03

  on both American and Russian territory. But it also implies these new Russian weapons, the Sarmat-2 and others, the Avangard, that can fly at Mach 29 and go around the South Pole so they can evade all the US radars pointed north.

• 29:10Dan Snow?

  Could you just give me the sort of one that seems to predict 9/11?

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Well, one that defined my life, because I started seeing it coming in his prophecies back in 1983. And I wrote a book about it, "Nostradamus: Premonitions of 9/11." The two prophecies are, "At 45 degrees latitude, the sky will burn. Fire to approach the great new city. Instantly, a huge scattered flame will leap up when they want verification from the Norman." What happened is, there were no longitudes in Nostradamus's time, and he was into maps. It's a great new city at somewhere around latitude 45, so you've got to give or take several, like, three or four degrees, because there's no longitudes. And that was the problem with latitudes in those days.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  That's coming centuries later. So I looked to see if there's any new city that literally did not exist at all in his time. And the only one I found was New York. It wasn't New Amsterdam for a long time. So I thought, "Well, maybe this is about New York." Now, the other thing is, 45 degrees latitude, it's double entendre. He loves layered and layered meanings. If you look at both jet impacts on the North and South Tower, they're at angles of 45 degrees. So it approached the great new city, great explosion in the air. I mean, I literally saw it live as it happened. I was asleep and I was being woken up by my Australian

• 30:43Speaker 03

  literary agent at the time, who was in London, calling me. I said, what happened? And he said, it's happened, mate. The terror attacks happening on the two towers. And so I dropped the phone and went out, turned on the TV just to see the second plane hit the South Tower alive.

• 31:02Dan Snow?

  Well, let's come on to what he might have come. I'm sure listeners are curious to know what he thinks about the future, our future, not just his future. So nuclear war, great, good news. What about extraterrestrial colonization and leaving this planet?

• 31:16Speaker 03

  He talked about sometime around in the year 3797, his last dated prophecy. He said that there'd be a great conflagration where mountains would be destroyed, the oceans would be destroyed because the sun is devouring the earth. It's becoming a red giant, basically is what he's saying. And he has it go up to the orbit of earth. The races, the races of man will move towards Aquarius for a period of time. Others will move to Cancer. And so he's saying that we are going to live on new earths that are orbiting the stars of Cancer.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  So it's quite a remarkable prophecy.

• 32:02Dan Snow?

  So the prophecies make him famous. How did he spend the last few years of his life?

• 32:06Speaker 03

  He was healthy, pale and hearty, right up to the end, except the last few years. And then he kind of very rapidly declined. He had dropsy, which is pulmonary edema. And he knew, okay, I'm just swelling up, his life was swelling up. He knew that his time had come. And his leg with gout was so severely swollen that he, they had to build him a bench so that he could prop up his swollen leg on it when he was in the bed. And by the way, he hadn't slept for months. He never slept much, but he hadn't slept for months. And he was propped up in his bed, which they moved the bed and the bench up into his beloved secret study. He wanted to leave there.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  And in early July, just as he was saying his goodbye to Chauvinier, he was his secretary. Chauvinier was the last person to see him when he said farewell to the rest of the family. Chauvinier said, basically, when he said, well, I see you tomorrow morning, master. And he said, you will not see me alive. So they all creeped up there at dawn and they found him had rolled off the bed and his body was between the bed and the bench, which brings me to the final prophecy of Nostradamus, which said, "On his return from the embassy," this would be in Aix-en-Provence, "the king's gift put in place," so some business he was doing for Charles IX, "he

• 33:34Speaker 03

  will do no more. He will be gone to God. Close relatives, friends, brothers by blood, found him completely dead near the bed and the bench." Now, maybe when he felt it coming, he rolled, you know, to fulfill his prophecy. But the other prophecy said, and this has actually been rediscovered, this prophecy, it is authentic. He said about the world that he was leaving. He said, "A sad state will be all states and sects," so he's talking about the wars of religion, "between brothers and sisters, enmity, discord, civil war."

• 34:16Speaker 03

  He's talking about treasures and free, more apparent, the tests, kind of a cryptic line. It's a hard one to figure out what he's trying to say. "The summer erred this lying to expire."

• 34:33Speaker 03

  I mean, after his son Caesar and his uncles died, the bloodline ended in the early part of the following century and might only have survived with his female bloodline into the 20th century.

• 34:48Dan Snow?

  As he died, was he more remembered for his prophecies as an author or for his medical work? What was his reputation? What was his legacy when he died?

• 34:57Speaker 03

  Well, he's definitely said one of his prophecies that even his fiercest skeptics can't deny. He said, "I shall become far more famous after my death than I ever was while alive." And certainly, it eclipses anything else that we know about him is his prophecies. Because in a way, the device that he used keeps people engaged, that kind of cryptic way. People want to decode it. People want to study it. So all the generations up to the present, up to me, are fascinated by this man and his prophecies. So by that device of literary device that he used, he kept people engaged, people that hate him, people

• 35:42Speaker 03

  that love him, which are passionate on both sides.

• 35:45Dan Snow?

  I love it. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 35:59Speaker 01

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• 36:29Speaker 02

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• 37:11Speaker 02

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• 37:20Dan Snow?

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.