Telesphorus of Cosenza (or Theophorus, Theolophorus) was a name assumed by one of the pseudo-prophets during the time of the Western Schism. As an pseudonymous author of a Latin work Liber de magnis tribulationibus, the name was attached to a 1365 production of the Fraticelli. The Liber was updated (by 1386) to fit the situation in the Schism.[1]
"Telesphorus" stated that he was born in Cosenza, Italy and lived as a hermit near the site of the ancient Thebes. His book of predictions on the Schism was the most popular of the prophetic treatises of the period. More than twenty manuscripts of it are extant, and it first appeared in print, with various interpolations, as Liber de magnis tribulationibus in proximo futuris (Venice, 1516).
The work was compiled about 1386 from the writings of Joachim of Fiore, Jean de Roquetaillade, the Cyrillic Prophecy (of Cyril of Constantinople), and other apocalyptic treatises whose authors are mentioned in the dedicatory preface addressed to Antoniotto Adorno, the Doge of Venice.
Its main prophecies are as follows:
Part 6, the crowning of the French king, was a popular prophecy in its own right, and drew on an existing tradition of prophecy about a Second Charlemagne. Reeves suggests that the origin of the Telesphorus prophecy was the wish to put the Second Charlemagne in context for followers of Joachim of Fiore. In the 1380s the king of France was Charles VI, son of Charles V.[2]
A criticism of these prophecies, written by the German theologian Henry of Langenstein, was printed in Bernhard Pez, Thesaurus Anecdotorum Noviss, I, II, (Augsburg, 1721-9), 507-64.