We've already covered back in good old 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue and proved himself to be a huge douchebag. Beyond Chris' personal douchiness, we've also covered the inadvertent shit show that the spreading of European diseases had on the Americas. What we haven't covered is the fact that old Columbus’ first contact was a two way street. That’s right, shit came back as well.
Now, it goes without saying that the Europeans got the better end of the stick that smarmy historians now call the Columbian Exchange. It's pretty obvious given that they got to enjoy a plethora of great new foods, such as corn and potatoes, and that instead of almost completely getting wiped out by disease, they instead went on to dominate the world politically, economically, and culturally for centuries. However, a bunch of delicious food is not the only thing Columbus and his crew brought back. By the time Columbus and his boys arrived in the New World, they had been at sea for well over three months. Now imagine a bunch of men who had only recently been convinced that they most certainly were probably going to die in the middle of the fucking ocean due to some mad man’s whim. Now imagine that same bunch of men suddenly discovering themselves on a tropical island filled with topless women. It's not hard to imagine what happened next. What, you can't imagine? Damn it you prude bastard, there was a lot of sex. Did I really have to spell it out for you? What’s next, do I have to mention that it was probably a mix of both consensual sex and rape? Well it was. You happy now? History is all sorts of fucked up like that.
Anyways, Columbus and his horny men came back to Spain in 1493, and being a horny crew, probably started hitting the brothels as soon as they arrived. With their taste for the finer things in life sated, many then decided to quit being sailors in favor of becoming mercenaries to fight with the king of France, who was invading Italy, because that's just what Italy was there for back then. Of course, as with any army, there would have been a significant group of prostitutes tagging along to sell their assets, and most likely quite of bit of copulation with the locals, both consensual and otherwise. Again, history is just riddled with this kind of terrible shit. It was all pretty standard for the day and age. What wasn't standard was the fact that these sailors turned soldiers were collectively patient zero for the spread of a new and terrible disease which they had brought back from the New World. A disease which today we call syphilis.
Syphilis today is not really considered that big of a deal, and even throughout most of history it was more of a slow burn than a firestorm, which was how it pretty much was for the Native Americans. However, for the Europeans, whose immune systems had never seen it before, it was one of the most horrifying diseases ever imagined. First a victim became covered in pustules, ulcers, and cysts from the top of their heads to the bottoms of their feet. Then their flesh began to die, releasing a terrible stench and eventually peeling and sloughing off, exposing the muscle and bone beneath. By this stage the victims would be in great agony, rotting and shambling around like some kind of living dead, before finally succumbing to death after a few months. So, you know, not a very pleasant way to die, even in a time full of all sorts of terrible ways to go. Over the next thirty years the disease spread like wildfire, killing five million people, which was an estimated five percent of Europe’s population at the time. Millions of people literally fucked themselves to death. Those who survived were left horrifically scarred.
Luckily, after that point the disease mutate into the form we know today, which was less terrifying zombie, and more just a couple of sores and having your brain rot away over several decades. Syphilis became a common disease throughout Europe from then on, infecting as much as twenty percent of the population at any given time. In fact, our vision of the aristocracy of that era, think thick pancake makeup on both sexes and extravagant powdered wigs, was due to syphilis. Pancake makeup was used to hide the sores and the wigs hid the fact that the only known treatment, mercury, made people's hair fall out. Some of the greatest minds of the European Renaissance died insane thanks to syphilis. The full threat was not ended until the invention of antibiotics in the 20th century.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Gerard_de_Lairesse_MET_1567.jpg