I have a question for readers about something I really do not claim to be a world expert on. This is the pox, the "French disease" ... That is, syphilis. Is anyone an expert on this subject? Can you help me out?

I want an authoritative view on how syphilis broke out in Europe in the 1490s. Did it come from the Americas? Or was it an old European disease that suddenly got noticed?

Syphilis was a scathing, searing, postulating horror in Renaissance Europe and the most feared of sexually transmitted diseases for centuries afterwards. As a child I remember being terrified by a scene in a film – it must have been Young Winston – where Lord Randolph Churchill, father of the well-known national saviour, struggles to give a speech in parliament while suffering the effects of syphilis. This really happened: "Randolph's face had a terrible mad look", said an observer. As an eight-year-old, after seeing that film, I took every precaution not to catch syphilis.

In Renaissance Italy, the disease was blamed on the French army that invaded in 1494 and brought the spirochete bacterium, Treponema pallidum, with it. It haunts Renaissance art. A portrait in the National Gallery of a doctor named Battista Fiera, by Lorenzo Costa, may be Costa's gift for helping him through a bout of the illness.There is a longstanding belief that syphilis came from America. While Columbus in 1492 took European diseases that wiped out almost the entire population of the Americas, it is often said that syphilis was the one disease he brought back, so the Europeans got at least some payback.

Yet in 2000, the discovery of well-preserved monks' skeletons in Hull apparently with evidence of syphilis long before Columbus sailed to America, complicated the story. There now seems to be a complex debate between those who uphold the Columbus theory and those who dismiss it. I would love to know the state of the art, or rather the state of the science. Can anyone offer a bang up-to-date, non-polemical answer to the question: did syphilis come from America?

If not, polemics are fine.