Ah, the High Renaissance in Italy. The sweet side of the Middle Ages, when Europe classed itself up with some nice artwork and architecture, started thinking about humanism, and reacquainted itself with classical philosophies.<\/p>\n
Italy, in particular, served as the petri dish for a lot of this cultural rebirthing. A peninsular lump of competing cities and territories, ruled by mercantilism and warfare, it was like a violent melting pot that churned out murder and cool paintings. There may have been new ideas and puffier pants, but things were still medieval.<\/p>\n
The southern city-state of Naples, in the late 15th century, acted as another kind of petri dish. In 1495, Naples came down with a case of super syphilis\u2014an early iteration of the disease that left the infected with ghastly lesions down to the bone, yet still living, for a time. The result: shuffling, contagious victims wandering the streets in various states of decay, aka Renaissance Zombies<\/strong>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease, so you might be thinking, \u201cSure, Italy makes sense, but I\u2019m a little surprised syphilis wasn\u2019t born in France.\u201d Well, just hold on.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s tick the old clock back a year to August 1494. A fella named King Charles VIII was running the show in France, and he decided to do a bit of invading across the Italian peninsula in what would become known as the Italian Wars. He had around 30,000 soldiers and a big artillery train. The soldiers were mostly mercenaries from all over the continent: lots of Spanish, Swiss, Gascons, Flemish, and Italians willing to sell their time and sharp objects to the highest bidder. Renaissance Italy was big on mercenary wars, and Charles VIII wanted to get in on that sh*t. Mostly, though, he wanted to make his way to Naples, take the city, and use it as a launch pad for some Crusading.<\/p>\n Charles VIII\u2019s merc parade wasn\u2019t all about soldiering types, however. In those days, armies were like little marching economies, and attracted a lot of groupies. About 800 camp followers hitched their proverbial wagons to Charles\u2019 war caravan, and provided non-military services: cooks, medics, and, most importantly, prostitutes.<\/p>\n Charles\u2019 army, led by General Louis II de la Tremoille, met resistance from each city on their way south to Naples. The French crushed them all. In February of 1495, they took Naples. After seven months of fighting their way across Italy, Charles\u2019 mercenaries were ready for a little self-indulgence.<\/p>\n Think: fleet week, but if the fleet was a bunch of foreign mercenaries, and they brought prostitutes with them. I wasn\u2019t there, but I bet there was a lot of drinking and fighting and nudity.<\/p>\n Anyway, they partied too hard. Soon enough, it became clear that a terrible disease was spreading through the city. The disease would become known by many names, including the \u201cDisease of Naples\u201d and the \u201cFrench Disease,\u201d which apportion blame to the city and to its invaders, respectively. But this was really an all-European-hands-on-deck disease, given the wide range of nationalities involved in its creation. It was like a little, bacterial proto-European Union. Except it made your skin fall off.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n You got it. First, the \u201csuper\u201d part.<\/p>\n Based on what we know from contemporary accounts\u2014descriptions and woodcuts left to us by scholars who witnessed the outbreak first hand\u2014the syphilis that hit Naples may have been an earlier, way more severe variant of the bacterial venereal disease we know and love today.<\/p>\n Granted, the Neapolitans in 1495 had rudimentary knowledge of medicine by today\u2019s standards. But, if we take them at their word, then we don\u2019t make syphilis today like they used to in the Renaissance. Late 15th-century syphilis may have had a higher, more rapid mortality rate, and was more contagious than it is now. This could indeed be true\u2014syphilis was a new disease, and its victims hadn\u2019t yet developed any natural immunity to infection, so it\u2019s possible they were more susceptible, and symptoms were worse.<\/p>\n Anyway, syphilis\u2014whether it\u2019s super or the normal kind you\u2019re more familiar with\u2014has a couple of stages: First, you contract the disease from coitus with, let\u2019s say, a Longobardi prostitute. You\u2019ve not worn a condom, because it\u2019s 1495, and you decide to wash up a couple days later. You remove your codpiece and\u2014sh*t\u2014you\u2019ve got genital ulcers. But at least they don\u2019t hurt (yet).<\/p>\n Do not panic. Soon a bad fever will take your mind right off those ulcers. Then come the rashes and joint and muscle pain. This will last weeks, maybe months. Meanwhile, you\u2019re probably drinking and sleeping with more prostitutes to take your mind off of your misfortune, because you\u2019re still about 400 years out from the discovery of germ theory.<\/p>\n Phase two is worse. Large abscesses and sores form all over your body. They\u2019re painful, they look bad, and they smell worse. As time goes on, these sores turn into large ulcers that eat into your bones and deteriorate eyes, nose, and lips\u2014basically, all the coolest parts of your face.<\/p>\n At this point, your joint and muscle pain has gotten worse, and especially bad at night. And the facial infection would often extend into the mouth and throat, which could lead to death.<\/p>\n But the disease could also take years to kill the victim. Naples, then, saw the infected walking or crawling the streets, faces rotted, bone exposed. For the George A. Romero-inclined, this is about as close as you can get to a historical zombie outbreak. Minus the cannibalism.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> <\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> <\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Charles VIII\u2019s army wore out its welcome soon enough. An Italian league joined together to expel the French king and his soldiers from Italy. After some bloody fighting\u2014in which many of Charles VIII\u2019s soldier were too syphilitic to fight\u2014the French managed to make their way through enemy territory in the north and returned to France. His mercenaries, their jobs done, returned to their homelands. Everyone brought syphilis with them. <\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Great. So we know that\u2019s at least, in part, how the outbreak in Naples made its way to all corners of Europe. Syphilis had spread to France, Switzerland, and Germany before the end of 1495. By 1497, England and Scotland had caught the bug; by the 1500s, Scandinavia, Hungary, Greece, Poland, and Russia. European explorers brought the disease with them. Calcutta was infected in 1498. By 1520, Africa, the Middle East, China, Japan, and Oceania were suffering from \u201cthe French disease.\u201d<\/p>\n But where\u2019d it come from? That\u2019s debatable\u2014it\u2019s still unclear if the disease was first contracted by European explorers in the New World, or if it, in fact, originated in Europe as a lesser disease, which mutated into something more severe. Old medical records weren\u2019t specific enough in their diagnoses to differentiate between a range of similar, poxy diseases, so syphilis may have been hiding in plain sight all along, waiting for the right conditions to mutate and really come out of its shell.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n What is clearer is who its Renaissance victims blamed: each other. Wherever you were from, syphilis came from somewhere else, which you can tell from the various names of the disease. The French liked to call it either the \u201cNeapolitan disease,\u201d given the locale of apparent origin, or the \u201cSpanish disease,\u201d blaming it on their own foreign mercenaries.<\/p>\n Italians preferred \u201cmorbus Gallicus<\/i>,\u201d or the \u201cFrench disease,\u201d since it appeared to have arrived with the French military host (despite it being constituted of a number of peoples, including Italians). The Germans followed suit, naming it the \u201cFrench evil.\u201d The Scots went with \u201cgrandgore<\/i>,\u201d derived from French terminology. Meanwhile, the Russians named it the \u201cPolish disease,\u201d while the Polish and Persians preferred the \u201cTurkish disease.\u201d<\/p>\n The Turks called it the \u201cChristian disease,\u201d the Tahitians called it the \u201cBritish disease,\u201d the Indians had the \u201cPortuguese disease,\u201d and the Japanese blamed the \u201cChinese pox\u201d on the, uh, Chinese.<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s How You Get Super Syphilis, And, Consequently, Renaissance Zombies<\/h3>\n
Tell Me More About Super Syphilis and Renaissance Zombies<\/h3>\n
Renaissance Zombies: First Naples, then the World<\/h3>\n
Memento Mori<\/h3>\n