A.D . 1184. ASTKOLOGICAL PREDICTIONS. poisonous stench.. In consequence, a mortality and sickness •will attack great numbers, and loud peals will be heard, and voices in the air that shall terrify the hearts of those who hear them, and the wind shall raise aloft the sands and the dust from the face of the earth, and shall utterly overwhelm the cities situate on the plain, and especially those in the sandy regions, those in the fifth climate, to wit ; as Mecca, Barsara, Baldac,33 and Babylon ; nor shall any land be left otherwise than covered, with the sand and dust, and be utterly ruined thereby ; so much so, that the regions of Egypt and ^Ethiopia shall become almost uninhabitable. And from the "West this calamity will extend to all parts of the East. In the regions of the ~West also shall arise dissensions.; and seditions of the people shall take place, and there shall be one of them who shall levy armies innumerable, and shall wage war on the shore of the waters, on which a slaughter so vast will take place that the flow of the blood so shed will equal the surging waves. Let each person feel assured that the conjunction about to take place, whatever others may say, signifies to me, if God so wills, the mutation of kingdoms, the superiority of the Franks, the destruction of the Saracenic race, with the superior blessedness of the religion of Christ, and its especial exaltation, together with longer life to those who shall be born hereafter." In like manner, "William the Astrologer, clerk to John, the constable of Chester, wrote concerning the before-mentioned conjunctions of the planets to the following effect :— " In the year from the Incarnation of our Lord one thousand one hundred and eighty-six, in the month of August, on the completion of the thirtieth day thereof, and in the following night, at the ninth hour, in the twenty-ninth degree of Virgo, which is called the degree of periods and the period of woes, Leo being in the ascendant, this conjunction, which is called a minor conjunction, is most portentous. Evil is predominant in this figure. This is followed by a conjunction of Mars and Saturn, in the fourth degree of Libra, on the seventh day of September, at the fourth hour, being the first day of the week ; the Sun being the lord of the hour, and Sagittarius the horoscope. This conjunction is called a mid-conjunction. In this conjunction good fortune is predominant ; and in this inclination 3 3 Probably Bassora and Bagdad.