It showed up in Europe around 1493, and even though Europeans are very fond of ascribing syphilis to each other, Italians called it the French disease, the French called it the disease of Naples, Poles called it the German disease, Russians called it the Polish disease, the truth is venereal syphilis was spread by sailors who'd returned from the Americas. In fact, in his book The Columbian Exchange, Crosby tells it like this, Sailors by the nature of their profession are men without women, and therefore men of many women. We can imagine no group more perfectly suited for guaranteeing that venereal syphilis would have worldwide distribution. Who says history books are boring? Syphilis would go on to infect a veritable who's who of Europe, from Baudelaire to Gauguin to Nietzsche, not to mention numerous family members of the famously infertile Tudor and Valois families, meaning that syphilis may be responsible for many of those miserably boring dynastic power struggles of post-Columbus Europe. Anyway, nothing against syphilis, but it pales in comparison to the devastation wrought by old world diseases arriving in the new world, but the new world did have one gift for the old world that was pretty destructive. Tobacco.