3.4 A war in the Middle East strikes France, Italy

Because of heat like that of the sun upon the sea,
the fish around Negrepont will become half cooked.
The local people will eat them
when in Rhodes and Genoa there is a lack of food. (ΙΙ-3).

As a result of the continuing unrest in the Middle East it will escalate into yet another one of the wars that take place there. One of the leaders will be able to get hold of an atomic weapon. He will be crazed, and will go to great lengths for the smallest thing. So the people he is warring against retaliate with an atomic weapon. The country is right there; it has a coast on the Mediterranean. «Negerpont» is at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. There is a place there where there are some cliffs that are of a dark color.  And when this country is bombed, one of the bombs will land in the Mediterranean instead of on the land.

When it goes off, it will poison almost all «the fish» in the Mediterranean, and kill a lot of them «from the heat». Due to this war the regular passages of trade will be disrupted, so that the people on the other coast of the Mediterranean will be desperate enough for food «they'll eat the fish» anyway, even though they know they should not.

The atomic weapon being dropped by one of the Middle Eastern countries, will spark off yet another war on top of that war and they will be fighting back and forth. Other countries, particularly European and Western nations, will feel they need to interfere to try to stop the war because of the supplies of fuel. 

So when the European countries try to interfere, the same crazed leader that dropped an atomic weapon before, will use up the rest of his arsenal on Europe. Most of it will be striking southern Europe since that is the closest part of Europe. As a result, the European Mediterranean coast, particularly that of France and Italy, will be almost uninhabitable, and Italy will get the brunt of it.

The following quatrain is the continuation of the previous one :

From Monaco as far as Sicily
all the coast will remain deserted.
There will be no suburbs, cities nor towns
which have not been pillaged and robbed by barbarians. (ΙΙ-4)

«The barbarians» are the people under this crazed leader (he is not the Anti-Christ). What purpose this leader serves, since he uses his weapons injudiciously and gets the world involved with the war, is that he weakens the major nations to where the third Anti-Christ will be able to rise to power with little or no opposition. He sets the stage for the third Anti-Christ.