Charles VIII. left Vienne on the 23rd of August, and crossed Mont Genèvre on the 2nd September, whence he proceeded direct by Susa and Turin, joining his army at Asti on September 9. At Asti, says De Comines, he had an illness, which caused that minister to delay setting out on his mission to Venice for a few days. The original printed text of De Comines’ Chronique (Paris, 1528), says that the author remained at Asti a few days longer “because the king was ill of the smallpox (de la petite verolle) and in peril of death, for that the fever was mixed therewith; but it lasted only six or seven days, and I set out upon my way.” The next edition has no change but “in great peril of death” (en grant peril de mort), instead of merely “in peril.” Now, where did this diagnosis of petite verolle come from? Nothing is said of smallpox being prevalent at the time among the troops or along their route. The name petite verolle itself did not exist in 1494; it came into existence with grosse verolle, having being made necessary by the latter; and the first that we hear of grosse verolle is when the Italian campaign was over and the pox was raging in Paris, the Parlement of Paris, on the 6th of March, 1497, having made an ordinance against a certain contagious malady “nommée la grosse verole,” which had been in the kingdom and in the city of Paris since two years. Probably Comines deliberately wrote “petite verolle” in his manuscript, having composed the latter subsequent to 1498, or at a time when the terms verolle, or grosse verolle, and petite verolle, were passing current and were known in their respective senses. The causes or circumstances of the king’s malady at Asti are not enlarged upon by De Comines, farther than that he makes a somewhat disjointed remark, that all the Italian wines of that year were sour and that the season was hot, which would have had as little to do with the one kind of pox as with the other. Nor is anything said of smallpox spreading among those near the king[867].
The whole sequence of events, from the “folles amours” of Lyons to the sharp sickness at Asti, has suggested to historians, who have no medical theory to advocate, that it was not really petite vérole that the king suffered from, but grosse vérole. Martin says that Charles VIII. recommenced at Asti his Lyons follies and that he became violently sick, “of the smallpox, says one, or, perhaps, of a new malady which began to show itself in Europe,” meaning syphilis. To show that such infection was already possible, he quotes an ordinance of the provost of Paris April 15, 1488, enjoining “the leprous” to leave the capital. This is very like Edward III.’s order to the London “lepers” a century and a half earlier, in which the reasons given (the frequenting of stews, the pollution of their breath, &c.) point somewhat clearly to the nature of their “leprosy.” An order for the banishment of “lepers” from Paris in 1488 must have been occasioned by some unusual risk of contamination, just as the London order of 1346 would have been. It is in that sense that the French historian regards it; the ordinance, he says, “concernait probablement déjà les syphilitiques confondus avec les lépreux[868].”
De Comines, who is the authority for the diagnosis of smallpox, had inserted the word petite before verolle for reasons best known to himself. I shall show in the next chapter, upon smallpox and measles in England, that the ambiguous teaching of the faculty as to the nature and affinities of the pox proper within the first years of its epidemic appearance gave a ready opportunity of calling the grosse vérole by the name of petite vérole in circumstances where it was polite, or prudent, or convenient so to do. The only importance of a correct diagnosis of the king’s malady is that the case of one would have been the case of many.
The indications all point to a somewhat unusual prevalence of lues venerea previous to the autumn of 1494, in the luxurious provinces of southern France as well as in the capital. Beyond doubt, the malady had already spread by contagion to the great Spanish ports nearest the Gulf of Lyons. The expedition of Charles VIII. passed through that region on its route over the Alps. According to Sebastian Brant, it was the French who brought the disease into Liguria, and, according to Grünbeck, it issued, Gallico tractu, ab occidentali sinu, gathered like a dense cloud super Insubriam (the Milanese), and was thence dispersed, as if by the winds, over the whole province of Liguria.
But for the circumstances of the military expedition of 1494, and the state of war in Italy for two years after, it is conceivable that the unusual prevalence in France of a very ancient malady would have had little interest for Europe at large, although the cities on the nearest coast of Spain appear to have already shared the infection. That unusual prevalence in the south of France has in it nothing of mystery; the period was the end of the Middle Ages, distinguished by a revival of learning, of trade and commerce,—a revival of most things except morals. But, assuming that there was such unusual prevalence above the ancient and medieval level, it may still seem unaccountable that a great European epidemic, of a most disastrous and fatal type, should have been engendered therefrom.
There are, however, many parallel cases, on a minor scale from modern times, of a peculiar severity of type, of inveteracy, and of communicability by unusual ways, having been cultivated from commonplace beginnings, among unsophisticated communities about the Baltic and Adriatic, the people being without resident doctors and unfamiliar with such a disease and its risks. These have been collected and analyzed by Hirsch, whose conclusion is that “the mode of origin, and the character of these endemics of syphilis, appear to me to furnish the key to an understanding of the remarkable episode of the disease in the 15th century,—an episode which entirely resembles them as regards its type, and differs from them only as regards extent[869].”
Referring the reader for farther particulars to the work quoted, I shall leave the antecedents of the epidemic of pox in the end of the 15th century to be judged of according to the probabilities thus far stated.