Prognosticon

...for since Mars exists as the author of wars. Since the irascible virtue, as astrologers report and physicists prove, is vehemently excited and moved because of his wondrous heat and dryness and the vehemence that he indeed effects in human bodies. Hence the inflammations of spirits, hence contentions and discords, hence finally the fomentations of wars. Wherefore, let not malevolent detractors accuse and condemn me of falsity if I denied a battle in the previous year. Let it be that a certain small town named Mordano was conquered; nevertheless, I would rightly have called it not the fury of war, but rather warlike tumults and the clamor of arms. These, I say, were the preludes of war and the incitements of future disaster. Hence, I call it a battle where there is the greatest slaughter, where there are many overthrows of towns, where there are destructions of cities, and where finally many thousands of men are slaughtered. Whence it was cautioned by law among the Romans, as historians report, that no one should triumph unless five thousand of the enemy had fallen in one battle. For which reason, we wish in this place to repeat in part what we wrote in the previous forecast concerning war, so that the cavils of such triflers and sycophants might be abolished for the present. Which are these, word for word: If by chance or fortune depopulations of fields and incursions and destructions of villages and civil tumults were to be excited in certain places in Italy, that will happen only because of the eclipse of the Sun and the Moon to come in this same month this year, if we admit the opinion of Hermes. But good gods, what warlike tumults, what clamors of arms, what finally furies of Mars do I prepare and affirm for you in the following year! Now Mars roars and bellows. Now, with the bonds broken—by which the incredible wisdom of princes held him, the squalid one, obscured by hair and beard, until that time—and having compelled him into most arrayed battle lines, the furious one leaps forth with a shaken spear. He lays low, overwhelms, and slaughters. So far, these things. Therefore, let those be silent in a bad matter, who, having no commerce with virtue, were born only for malice.

lest I dwell near the tombs

Concerning the Plague. Chapter 8.

Let it be that no indication of a future plague this year should appear to us from the influx of the stars; that which has been handed down to memory by physicians, however, warns us sufficiently to testify that this year will labor for some time with pestilential disease. Physicists relate that pestilence is greatly excited because of the multitude of unburied corpses, since the air is corrupted and from that the people are infected, the complexions of bodies are contaminated, and the spirits are depraved. Why, even that which is taught to us by Avicenna in the second [book] of the first, that we should not dwell near burial grounds. And that which exaggerates the suspicion of this matter from the unhappy defect of the Sun, which Mars infects...