"When King Charles VIII of France occupied Naples in 1495, his army of nearly 20,000 mercenaries became the ground zero of the "Great Pox," the first massive venereal syphilis pandemic in Europe, which went on to cause up to 5 million deaths. For a long time, the siege of Naples was considered the first time syphilis entered European accounts and culture."
"While the French occupation of Naples did not introduce syphilis to this world, it created the perfect storm that shaped the perception of this disease and its origins for centuries to come. The first ingredient of this storm was the French army and its leader. Charles VIII invaded Naples with a vast melting pot of brigands and mercenaries from all over Europe, including the French, Swiss, Poles, and Spaniards."
A 5,500-year-old Treponema pallidum genome was recovered from an individual excavated in a Colombian rock shelter, indicating treponemal diseases such as syphilis, bejel, and yaws are several millennia older than previously believed. The finding challenges the longstanding link between syphilis origins and the 1495 Naples pandemic and implies a deeper evolutionary history for Treponema pallidum. The 1495 Naples outbreak involved a large, diverse mercenary army and a city known for luxury and sex, circumstances that amplified spread and shaped perceptions of the disease for centuries. The ancient genome prompts reevaluation of treponemal emergence and dispersal timelines.
Read at Ars Technica
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]