Few speculative fascinations have lingered quite as long as the human desire to foretell the future. For over fifteen hundred years, the prophetic books of the Sibylline Oracles persisted in manuscript and print and were widely read as authentic ancient text. Only during the first half of the seventeenth century, thanks to the scholarly demolition work of Johannes Opsopaeus and Sebastian Chateillon, and David Blondel, were they finally revealed to be late-antique Judeo-Christian apologetic retrojections into the pre-Christian pagan past.

Another less-well-known prophetic forgery was the so-called Oracles of Leo the Wise, which circulated widely throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period. Attributed popularly if also aspirationally to the learned ninth-century Byzantine emperor Leo VI, this work assumed many different forms over time, adapting to changing polemical purposes. Though always a collection of poems, each of which was paired with an ambiguous emblematic illustration, the earliest version of the text foretold the fates of various Byzantine emperors and events that would befall Constantinople. Later they would be applied to events in Greece and, after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, to a predicted deliverance of the ancient city back into Christian hands. They were even adapted to predict the rise and fall of popes by Pseudo-Joachim of Fiore in his famous late thirteenth-century Vaticinium.

The subsequent rise of the Ottoman Empire and its successive forays into Europe—the sieges of Belgrade (1521), Vienna (1529), Malta (1565), Venetian-controlled Famagusta (1570), and the epic Battle of Lepanto (1572)—were repeatedly expressed in apocalyptic terms in propaganda intended to unite the Christian West in solidarity against a monumental, hostile, and aggressive Islamic empire. This persistent scribal tradition was first presented in printed form in the Bibliotheca Fictiva’s Brescian edition by Pietro Marchetti, Vaticinium Severi, et Leonis Imperatorum, in quo videtur finis Turcarum (1596). Its first appearance in printed form may have been precipitated by the prosecution of the so-called Long Turkish War against the Habsburg empire’s Hungarian principalities (1593–96), which was supported in Italy by Pope Clement VIII’s formation of an allied Holy League against the Ottoman invaders.

Here, as in the printed original, the illustrations, rooted in animal and anthropomorphic symbols, are closely keyed with guide letters to the relevant epigrams and allied expositions detailing the verses’ pithy, if enigmatic, meanings. The second prophecy of Repentance, for example, illustrated by two crows and a serpent, presents an allegory wherein the second son (i.e., the serpent) will destroy the bear (i.e., the king or emperor), only to be savaged itself by crows owing to descent from a degenerate Eastern race, thus bringing only despair and tears.

The 1701 Hopkins manuscript concludes with yet more latter-day accretions to the Leonine Oracles: a series of prophecies predicting the reign of one thousand years of Islam are presented as confirmation that in fact the threat of Ottoman domination was over, as their thousand years had begun in 622, and thus by 1622 had effectively passed. The failure of the Ottoman Siege of Vienna of 1683, mentioned in the title, constitutes proof of that, as does also the assurance that even with the passing of the Habsburg Spanish dynasty in 1701 the Turkish threat has been overcome by time. Thus, the Oracles of Leo for centuries constituted a rich and imaginative source for the promotion of politically advantageous “vaticinium ex eventu” (prophecy from the event)—a prophetic text written by one who already possesses the information of what has transpired so as to make their oracular pronouncements unimpeachable and preternaturally “precise.”

—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens