“…This might have been historically unnoticed, given the presumably high mobility of sailors in the past and the documented speed with which the epidemic moved (Tognotti, 2009), which would have made any area of the European continent equally affected in a few years. While this is a hypothesis to consider, it is not currently supported by available data, as, to our knowledge, there have been relatively few published cases of palaeopathological putative acquired syphilis (Reverte, 1979;Lopes and Cardoso, 2000;Codinha, 2002;De Souza et al, 2006;Rissech et al, 2013;Schwarz et al, 2013) coming from the Iberian Peninsula before the Modern Age.…”