Kronos:The National Library of Canada provides an authorized mirror of this e-publication. The base document, however, is the one at http://ejmas.com/kronos. Most recent update: December 2004. Copyright © 2000-2004 Joseph R. Svinth All rights reserved.
Introduction
Kronos; A Chronology of the Martial Arts and Combative Sports, represents my idiosyncratic interpretation of the history of the martial arts, combative sports, and associated philosophical topics. If you have suggestions for improvement, please let me know. If you think you can do better, please do so.
The periods covered are:
0000 to 0499: http://ejmas.com/kronos/NewHist0000-0499.htm
0500 to 1349: http://ejmas.com/kronos/NewHist0500-1349.htm
1350 to 1699: http://ejmas.com/kronos/NewHist1350-1699.htm
1700 to 1859: http://ejmas.com/kronos/NewHist1700-1859.htm
1860 to 1899: http://ejmas.com/kronos/NewHist1860-1899.htm
1900 to 1939: http://ejmas.com/kronos/NewHist1900-1939.htm
1940 to present: http://ejmas.com/kronos/NewHist1940.htm
The bibliographies are at:
A-F: http://ejmas.com/kronos/MABibA-F.htm
Online references, a summary of recent changes, and general housekeeping information are found at:
If you prefer reading traditional print format, then please see the abbreviated chronology in Thomas A. Green, Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO, 2001). Meanwhile, if you prefer reading articles arranged topically rather than chronologically, then please see the essays in Green's encyclopedia and the chapters in Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth, editors, Martial Arts in the Modern World (Greenwood, 2003).
Finally, if you want to see how Kronos has evolved over time, then please see the first edition, which appears online at http://ejmas.netfirms.com/kronos.
***
About 1350:
Temple art shows Southeast Asian and Indonesian aristocrats carrying the serpentine daggers called krisses. For Vaishaivites, these blades appealed to a serpent god, while for Muslims, they symbolized a believer’s willingness to accept pain. Indeed, South Asian self-flagellation exercises are one possible source of inspiration for the pentjak ("evasions") associated with the use of these weapons, pentjak’s choreography shows people waging a war against their carnal selves. (The movements reflect the belief that people are little more than puppets on God’s stage. Because using force to overcome force is not a common theme in Indonesian culture, pentjak sword dances are more elusive than their European analogues. Hence the name.) Metaphysics were important, too. In Indonesia, for example, the best blades were made using meteoric iron, as it clearly had divine origin. Meanwhile, a nineteenth century Thai novel called The Story of Khun Chang Khun Phun described the proper manufacture of a royal kris as requiring "iron from the spire of a relic shrine, coffin nails of those who had died violent deaths, metal of a black bronze lance, a copper keris and a broken sword, nails from city gates… [The smith] melted these in a crucible, this excellent iron, together with black bronze, red gold and silver, and formed from them an ingot. While redhot he beat this out flat, and then he steeped it in magic chemicals for three days, according to prescription. Having repeated this seven times, at the auspicious hour he… brought together the ritual utensils" and so on until it was time to fix the blade to the hilt using a combination of resin and the hair of some fierce person who had suffered a violent death. They truly don’t make swords like that any more.
Oversized halberds and swords become popular in Japan. This was probably so that admirers could watch aristocratic duelists from a distance, as the Japanese pirates (waka) then raiding the Korean coast preferred lighter, handier weapons. The waka raids also paralyzed coastal trade throughout the South China Sea, caused the Koreans to adopt gunpowder artillery, and encouraged the development of swordsmanship academies in Japan. (The oldest known Japanese swordsmanship style is the Nen-ryu, which some people say Yasuhisa Kamisaka and Yoshimoto Somashiro established about 1350. Others date the creation of the Nen-ryu to the 1540s, and credit it to a Buddhist monk. Either way, Donn Draeger found 1700 registered sword ryu in the 1960s, plus 725 grappling ryu, 460 spear ryu, 425 halberd ryu, 412 sword-drawing ryu, and 412 archery ryu -- and those numbers ignored schools teaching ninjutsu, stick-fighting , ball-and-chain-fighting, karate, and sumo! All in all, far too many to describe, especially as the differences are frequently political rather than practical.)
Following a migration from the ocean of the sunset, the Zuni establish pueblos at the center of the world. In less metaphysical terms, this probably means their ancestors finished a migration that started in coastal California and ended in central New Mexico. Anthropologist Nancy Yaw Davis has suggested that some of the early Zuni were ethnically Japanese, perhaps the fifty to one hundred Pure Land Buddhists who fled Japan by ship in search of a place that was free of earthquakes and war.
1350:
Budweiser’s player of the week has an ancient history, if stories about England’s King Edward III awarding a French knight a pearl necklace for being the best combatant of the day are any indication.
By disguising sixty soldiers as woodcutters, then sneaking them into an English castle at Fougeray, the Breton man-at-arms Bertrand du Guesclin starts earning his reputation as a great captain. Such exploits, which were common during the Hundred Years War, were one source for subsequent tales about an English social bandit named Robin Hood. Another was the crime wave that followed the return of Edward’s professional soldiers to their homes in Britain.
1351:
The bell-makers of Venice cast huge bronze cannon for the Ottoman Turks. While their motivations probably included easier access to the enormous copper deposits of Kazakhstan (government bronze consisted of 88% copper, 10% tin, and 2% zinc), such dealings with Muslims explains why the Catholic Church would subsequently accuse Venetian bell-casters of being in league with the Devil.
About 1352:
A French chevalier named Geoffroy de Charny writes that while success in jousting was good, success in mass mêlées was better, and success in war was best. Success, in all cases, meant winning horses and reputation. Still, this was theory, and in practice, said a contemporary priest named Honoré Bonet, "The man who does not know how to set places on fire, to rob churches and usurp their rights, and to imprison their priests, is not fit to carry on war."
About 1353:
Naa Nyaglsi, the paramount chief of the northern Ghanaian kingdom of Dagbon, uses luntalli, or drummed music, to record his family’s reign histories. In African drum languages, drummers beat large and small drums to create a polyrhythm known as a "conversation." The larger drum, known as the mother, tells stories with beats that mimic spoken speech. The smaller drums maintain a separate rhythm for the accompanying dancers. Nicolo Vicentino described a similar use of music in Italy in 1555. Said Vincentino, "The inflections and intervals that all nations of the world use in their native speech do not proceed only in whole and half tones, but also in quarter tones and even smaller intervals, so that with the division of our harpsichord we can accommodate all the nations of the world."
1353:
The Byzantines invite the Ottoman Turks to cross the Dardanelles Straits, and help them conquer the Serbs. By the 1420s, the Turks controlled most of Europe east of the Danube. The only problem was that the Muslim Turks didn’t feel like sharing power with the Orthodox Byzantines.
1354:
The Islamic traveler Ibn Battuta reports seeing female warriors throughout Southeast Asia. While many of these women were probably sword-dancers, others were royal bodyguards. (Southeast Asian princes often preferred female bodyguards to eunuchs.)
1355-1368:
In the fourteenth century, disease was viewed as an indication of God’s will. If He supported a kingdom, there were no plagues or wars. And if He did not, there were plagues and wars. The spread of the Black Death told many people that God had withdrawn His support from all existing governments. As a result, millenarian uprisings rocked Eurasia. In East Asia, the Korean aristocracy took advantage of the popular unrest to drive the Mongols from Korea. As a warning against over-confidence, the Buddhist prelate T’aego reminded King Kongmin of Koryo that "tigers do not eat animals with stripes, for fear of injuring their own kind."
1356:
The Breton knight Bertrand du Guesclin – he had been knighted after kidnapping an English officer in 1354 -- engages in a duel with an English knight named Thomas of Canterbury. The two men started the duel on horseback with swords. When Canterbury lost his sword, du Guesclin jumped down and threw the weapon into the crowd and his own after it. Canterbury then tried to ride du Guesclin down with his horse. Du Guesclin ducked underneath the horse – despite modern legends, a strong man could do gymnastics in well-made armor -- and stabbed the Englishman’s horse to death, pinning the Englishman to the ground in the process. At this, the seconds intervened, du Guesclin calmed down, the fight ended, and the combatants and their seconds went to dinner with their ladies.
About 1360:
German helmet manufacturers introduce articulated visors. The new visors replaced the crudely hinged visors that had been in use since the 1290s. The purpose of such visors was to reduce the likelihood of heat stroke.
Chinese authors begin writing down the oral traditions known as Shui Hu Chuan ("The Story of the River Bank"). These stories were originally set near the end of the Northern Sung period, meaning the early 1100s, and featured a social bandit named Sung Chiang. The writers associated with this transcription are Shi Nai-an (a possible eighteenth century forgery) and Lo Kuan-chung, the pseudonym of a fourteenth-century romance novelist. A version running to 120 individual episodes appeared in 1614, but in 1641 literary critic Chin Sheng-t’an edited this to a more manageable 71 and simultaneously reset the plot to the late Ming Dynasty. In the process the 108 bandits of the stories were made loyal to the old emperor and ascribed other conventional values. This latter text is the version of the story most commonly translated into English. (For example, All Men are Brothers in 1933 and The Water Margin in 1937.) From a historical standpoint, all stories in the canon must be considered fictional. For example, the bandits’ inaccessible mountain lair at Liang-shan is just 400 feet high. As for their remote mountain home, well, Shantung Province is about as flat as Kansas and as densely populated as France. But from a cultural standpoint the facts of the matter are entirely irrelevant, for these stories helped shape Chinese popular culture the same way that Shakespeare shaped English culture and Luther shaped German culture. Explains Chinese American journalist Frank Chin, "All of Chinese literature and language, high and low culture, schooled and unschooled immigrants, the founders of the tongs and associations, the founders of the Chong Wah, the hatchet men, the Chinamen on the railroad, the gamblers, dopers, fighters, and writers in Chinatown -- all swim in the scenes and strategy of heroes of The Three Kingdoms and The Water Margin."
1361:
The French mathematician Nicole Oresme invents line graphs. The idea was to show how far something would move in a given length of time given uniform acceleration. The idea is revolutionary, as it causes European merchants to realize that relationships are not constant, but change over time.
1362:
British lawyers begin speaking English instead of French. The change was due to the Black Death having created a shortage of French-speaking Englishmen. The accused still did not have the right to defense counsel, however.
1363:
The Breton knight Bertrand du Guesclin marries. This is in itself unremarkable, except that while du Guesclin, whose father was a minor knight, was illiterate, his wife Tiphaine, whose father was an aristocrat, was not. Instead, she was a noted astrologer and mathematician. So du Guesclin’s marriage is mentioned as a reminder that medieval literacy was more a function of social class at birth than gender.
1364:
King Edward III approves the construction of toll roads. Their original purpose was to pay for filling notoriously marshy sections of the roads around London with gravel.
1364-1405:
Tamerlane’s armies ravage Central and Southwest Asia. While Tamerlane was a devout Muslim, and non-Muslims took the brunt of the Timurids’ legendary cruelty, his use of female archers in defense of baggage trains appalled orthodox Muslim opponents. Born in 1336 to a Tatar family living near Samarkand, Tamerlane became the leader of the Jagatai horde in 1364. In 1369 he overthrew the ruling khan, and for the next ten years, he fought for control of Eastern Turkestan. Once this was accomplished in 1380, he turned his attentions toward Iran, Iraq, and Armenia. After burning, raping, and pillaging his way through these countries, he turned north toward Russia and the Golden Horde. After destroying the Golden Horde in 1395, he swung south and sacked Baghdad, Georgia, Lahore, and Delhi. In 1400, he invaded Syria, and sacked Aleppo and Damascus. During his return to Central Asia via Anatolia he captured the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid in 1402. Tamerlane embarked on an expedition to China in 1405, but died before the attack could begin. Clearly the finest tactician of the fourteenth century, Tamerlane’s campaigns were never strategically motivated. Religion never played much part, either, as he destroyed Muslim armies as happily as Buddhist, Christian, or Hindu armies. Instead, Tamerlane’s wars were waged mostly for gold and glory.
About 1365:
The Minangkabau Kingdom rises in Central Sumatra. This kingdom was originally Tantric Buddhist, but was gradually converted to Islam during the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, Minangkabau women retained a stronger voice in government than was typical in Islamic countries.
About 1368:
In India, Rajput princes hire Ottoman artisans to cast bronze cannon for them. Cannons are also reported in Kashmir and Gujarat about 1422 and in Bengal around 1450.
1368:
After seizing Peking from the Mongols, a Chinese warlord named Chu Yüan-chang establishes himself as the Hung-wu ("Extensive and Martial") emperor, thereby establishing the Ming Dynasty. The word Ming means "Brilliant," and alludes to the Indo-Iranian god Mazda, King of Light; the reason was to convince religious sectarians that the millennium had arrived. Because Chu was an orphan raised at the Shaolin monastery, Chinese panegyrists subsequently attributed all Shaolin monks with nearly supernatural fighting prowess. Thus during the nineteenth century many Chinese secret societies claimed the Hung-wu emperor as their First Ancestor, and to this day some use the character "hung" in the names of indoctrinated members.
1369:
To encourage men to spend their free time practicing archery, England’s King Edward III issues a proclamation "forbidding all and singular" to throw dice, play ball games, or participate in cock-fighting. Meanwhile, his French opponents busied themselves buying bronze cannon from the Italians.
About 1370:
Japanese gentlemen start carrying their swords edge upwards instead of edge downwards. This was due to a change in suspension systems that made the weapons easier to wear with civilian clothes.
1371-1382:
The Muscovite government takes advantage of Tamerlane’s attacks on his Mongol neighbors to quit paying tribute and homage to the Horde. The loss of income outrages the Turks, and several major battles follow. The Horde’s crushing defeat of the Muscovites and their Lithuanian allies in 1382 has been downplayed in most Russian history books, and instead the readers’ attention has been directed to relatively insignificant Muscovite victories of 1378 and 1380. Both Muscovite and Turkic armies of the era relied on aristocratic mounted archers who constantly bickered over honor and precedence. There was little peacetime training except hunting. Tactics consisted of firing a volley of arrows, then charging headlong against the enemy, sabers flashing. The usual victims of these cavalry attacks were not other cavalrymen, but the mobs of militiamen and camp followers that followed the mounted men wherever they went.
1371:
A Christian prince named Marko Mrnyaycevic becomes the Ottoman satrap ruling Prilep, Macedonia. During the early eighteenth century, Serbo-Croat poets create several important epics about Marko, who was said to be capable of mowing down a thousand Turks with a single blow from his 50-pound sword. Bosnian Muslims, meanwhile, told stories about Marko’s equally redoubtable Islamic rival, Djerzelez Aliya of Sarajevo. While written using the same language, the Christians won the battles in the Serbian stories, while the Muslims won in the Bosnian stories. And in both, daring heroes rather than teenaged rape gangs won the battles.
1373:
Japanese pirates sack Hanyang, Korea (modern Seoul). Over the next 25 years, other Japanese pirates raid the Korean coast nearly four hundred more times. The result is the introduction of vast quantities of museum-quality Korean temple art into Japanese collections. The Japanese government refused to admit the Korean origin of this magnificent artwork until 1978.
About 1374:
The Malayan national hero Hang Tuah moves from Minangkabau, Sumatra to Malaka, Malaya. As Hang Tuah was a shopkeeper’s son and Malaka was a major spice-trading port, the motivation was probably mercantile rather than military. Hang Tuah is famous for introducing both krisses and silat ("quick action," with an implication of "a method for overcoming any problem posed by an adversary") into southern Malaya. As his teachers included a Buddhist monk named Adi Putra, stylistic input may be southern Indian. But as most practitioners were Muslim, Sufism seems a more likely root. Be that as it may, there are at least sixty separate silat styles in the Indonesian archipelago. (Essentially, at least one per island.) Meanings depend on the teacher: some stress the practical (merchants needing defense from robbers) while others stress the esoteric (Sufis teaching youngsters to overcome their carnal selves). Graceful, almost choreographed movement characterizes traditional silat with a partner. Hand motions are often named after animal movements. For example, the cat sneaks up, the bear comes over the top, and the monkey seizes. Blocking is not forceful, but fluid and graceful. This is probably because the Indonesians believe that meeting force with force is inelegant. (These beliefs have changed somewhat in the twentieth century, probably because of the association of silat with Indonesian nationalism during the 1930s and sporting contests during the 1960s.) Skill is judged on esthetics rather than knockouts, first blood, or scored points. The projection of inner power is part of the esthetic, and learning the art is said to require an intimate personal relationship between teacher (guru) and student (murid). Musical accompaniment is typical.
1374:
Geoffrey Chaucer writes, "Ne veyn delit... or torney Marcial," in his play Troylus. This is the earliest recorded use of the English word "martial." In the "Miller’s Tale," Chaucer also wrote that "at wrastlynge [the miller] wolde have alwey the ram," meaning that the powerful miller would always win the prize of a ram. The knight Sir Topas also wrestled, as Chaucer said of him, "Of wrastlynge was there noon his peer,/There any ram shal stande."
1377:
After learning how to manufacture gunpowder from a Yüan Chinese engineer, a Korean official named Ch’oe Mu-son persuades the Koryo court to establish a "Superintendency for Gunpowder Weapons." While the Koryo court didn’t survive much longer, the gunpowder weapons do, and in 1419 a Chinese embassy to Seoul was allowed to watch an exhibition of nocturnal cannon blasts. Nevertheless, the most Korean gunpowder weapons from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries were not cannon but man-portable rockets. Rockets called chuhwa were carried by cavalrymen and could be fired while on the move while rockets called sinkijon were essentially multiple-warhead fire arrows fired from cartwheels.
1378:
A Welsh mercenary named Owain Glyndwr is murdered in France. The son and grandson of wealthy Welsh landowners, Owain had lost a court case over land, and afterward harbored a serious grudge against the English. His military exploits and hatred of the English endeared him to the Welsh people, and when the Welsh rebelled against the English in 1402, Owain Red Hand became the subject of many legends and stories. These stories in turn inspired Shakespeare’s character Glendower.
1379:
In the Mediterranean, the Venetians mount cannon on round ships. Two years later, the Teutonic Knights followed suit in the Baltic.
About 1380:
Bornean Muslims settle the Sulu Islands. The most famous of these traders was Abu Baker, who established himself as the Sultan of the Sulu Archipelago in 1450. During the holidays and coronation ceremonies of such sultans, Muslim soldiers often did sword dances known as dabus. These had Indonesian and Sufi roots, and provide one root for the modern Filipino stick-fighting art known as arnis de mano, or "harness of the hand". Christian moro-moro plays produced for performance during Carnival provide another major root. Around 1609, Spanish priests discovered that these vernacular plays, with their emphasis on broad humor, self-flagellation, and stylized battles using arnis were popular. "The most famous play was supposedly written in 1637 – celebrating a victory of the local Christians over the Muslim leader Kudarat (Corralat)," said Kathy Foley in Cambridge Guide to World Theatre. "The event was probably first played out in Cavite province by boys and the one playing the Muslim leader was actually wounded." Musical accompaniment included brass bands playing music in three different tempos.
As the fear of malignant sorcery spreads through Europe, legal codes start requiring duelists to swear oaths that they do not carry any stones of power, magical herbs, or lucky charms in or on their bodies, weapons, or clothes while participating in duels. Of course, this did not stop wrestlers, prizefighters, and duelists from carrying such charms, or hiring priests to say Black Masses for still-living enemies. Neither did it keep kings from hiring wizards such as Zyto of Bohemia, probably because they trusted their executioners to do the right thing if the magicians somehow became too powerful.
1380:
The Venetians and Genoans develop war-rockets.
Woodcarvings done for the choir seats at England’s Chester Cathedral show wrestlers in action.
1381:
The burghers of Augsburg use man-portable cannon to scare their enemies’ war-horses. These German firearms were mounted on poles, and slung over men’s shoulders instead of pulled along by animal-drawn sledges or carts. This was not because the German soldiers liked carrying the extra weight. Instead, it was because their supply wagons had no suspensions while their roads had great ruts, and anything transported in those wagons along those roads had to be packed with great care if it was not to be ruined. (The wagon-makers of Kocs, Hungary -- hence the English word "coach" -- did not invent lightweight, leather-suspended carriages until the fifteenth century.)
1382:
Grand Duke Dmitri Donskoi equips Moscow’s forts with gunpowder artillery. Still, the Muscovites did not use field artillery until the Ugra River campaign of 1480, or equip their infantry with muskets until 1512. Meanwhile, in an effort to achieve similar sound and fury through magic, the Count of Kyburg (a village northeast of Zurich, Switzerland) hires a witch to stand on his battlements and raise a thunderstorm. During the winter of 1589-1590, Dr. John Fian raised the most famous storm attributed to witches -- it ostensibly caused the death of the Scottish King James VI.
1383:
German butchers establish the Bürgershaft von St Marcus von Lowenberg ("The Citizens’ Association of Saint Marcus of Lowenberg") at Frankfurt-am-Rhein. This was a sword-dancing club where members learned a mimed dance using carving knives instead of swords. To reduce injuries, the sword techniques taught used slashing movements rather than thrusting blows. Dances were done publicly during Carnival and Christmas. While the dances themselves were festive in nature, rival guilds often fought over which should have precedence during parades and speeches. Therefore, members also practiced wrestling, tripping, and clubbing. Butchers also danced the sword dance in Zwickau in Bohemia, while in Breslau (now Wroctaw, in Poland), it was the skinners.
1386:
Upon the marriage of the Hungarian/Polish Princess Hedvig (Jadwiga) to the Lithuanian Grand Duke Jogaila Algirdaitis (Jagiello), Lithuania officially converts to Roman Catholicism. This conversion probably owed more to politics than faith, and according to some accounts, Jagiello did not convert until he was on his deathbed. Definitely the national conversion was nominal, as in 1413, a French visitor was horrified to learn that Lithuanians cremated their dead rather than burying them. In 1579, another Western European was equally horrified to discover that the old gods Perkunas, Laukosargas, and Zemepatis remained popular in rural areas. "Forests, like mountains," says historian Peter Burke, "are effective barriers to the spread of new customs and beliefs."
1387:
Gaston, Count de Foix, writes a book about mounted hunting called Livre de la Chasse ("Book of the Chase"). Between 1406 and 1413 it was translated into English for Edward, Duke of York, and renamed The Master of Game. No mention is made of riding, as it was assumed any nobleman knew how to do that. As for control, says Vladimir Littauer, "The number, variety, and extravagance of the means devised at the time to make a horse simply move forward make one wonder if the animal was indeed as stubborn and cold-blooded as the authors make him out to be, or if he was not so uncomfortably bitted that he moved in any direction with reluctance."
1388:
A general named Yi Song-gye seizes control of the Koryu Dynasty, then orders the Korean capital moved from Kaesong to Hanyang (modern Seoul) for geomantic reasons. Four years later, Yi crowns himself king, a decision that marks the birth of Korea’s long-lived Choson Dynasty.
1389:
Sixty aristocratic women lead 60 knights and 60 squires from the Tower of London to the lists at Smithfield. The thought of females actually fighting during a tournament was, in the words of a near-contemporary German author, "as impossible as a king, prince, or knight plowing the ground or shoveling manure." (Contemporary tales of female jousters appear most often in erotic fantasies and satires.) However, women did sometimes compete in ball games and foot races. Many wealthy women also enjoyed hunting with crossbows and falcons.
A German priest named Hanko Doebringer publishes some commentaries on swordsmanship. Although the principle weapon described was a long sword measuring around 4 feet in length, the use of short sword, sword-and-buckler, and staff were also described. The methods were said to be several hundred years old at the time, and Doebringer attributed his knowledge to a teacher named Johannes Liechtenauer. The text was highly theoretical and couched in obscure terms, perhaps to keep his methods from being readily taught to the uninitiated. Nevertheless, its insights fueled discussion in Germany for the next three centuries.
About 1390:
The Byzantines buy some Genoan and Venetian cannons. The big Italian guns were not very useful to the Byzantines, as their recoil damaged Constantinople’s ancient and ill-repaired walls. Therefore, unlike the Ottomans and Italians, who liked big cannons, the Byzantine generals continued to prefer man-portable fire-lances.
About 1391:
According to a seventeenth century hagiographer named Wang Hsi-ling, Chang San-feng, a Taoist alchemist turned minor deity, creates t’ai chi ch’uan ("Grand Ultimate Boxing"). Unfortunately, the first known association of Chang with boxing didn’t appear in written records until the sixteenth century, when the boxer Chang Sung-ch’i mentioned that he had learned his methods from Chang in a dream. Still, through stories such as these, Chang gradually became the patron saint of Taoist internal boxers. During the mid-nineteenth century, someone using Chang’s name wrote a series of epigrams known as the T’ai Chi Ch’uan Ching ("Classic of Grand Ultimate Boxing"). A sample of these epigrams follows. The translation is by Benjamin Lo and his students, Martin Inn, Robert Amacker, and Susan Foe.
The feet, legs and waist
must act together simultaneously,
so that while stepping forward or back
the timing and position are correct.
If the timing and position are not correct,
the body becomes disordered,
and the defect must be sought
in the legs and the waist.
1391:
During a series of battles in Siberia, Tamerlane roundly defeats the Golden Horde. This, combined with the ravages of the Black Death, effectively destroys the Mongol control over Central Asia. This, in turn, explains why the Chinese, Koreans, Russians, and Iranians were able to recover their autonomy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
1392:
The Spanish army starts issuing man-portable firearms having curved rather than knobbed buttstocks. This was because the Spanish liked firing their hand cannons from the shoulder instead of placing them "just before the right pap," in the French fashion. The reason probably had to do with sensitivity to recoil; said Sir Roger Williams in 1590, "For recoiling, there is no hurt if [muskets] be straight stocked after the Spanish manner… True it is, were they crooked stocked, after the French manner, to be discharged on the breast, few or none could abide their recoiling." Either way, the weapons were usually placed in firing rests, as their 5-foot long barrels were entirely too unwieldy to shoot offhand. Soldiers used musket rests to support their barrels, while aristocratic hunters used their servants’ shoulders.
1393:
According to Okinawan tradition, emigrants from Fukien Province introduce ch’uan fa to the Ryukyus. Unfortunately for the premise, these Chinese emigrants were navigators and shipwrights rather than boxers. Consequently, in the words of the US historian George Kerr, "There is no evidence that they were more than very ordinary folk at home on the China coast." Therefore, the Okinawan tradition is probably spurious.
About 1395:
The Ottoman Turks start admitting Christian apostates into their armies. Some of these were young men drafted into the Ottoman army; others were heterodox Christians suffering from Greek Orthodox or Roman Catholic religious persecution. Such apostate units were known as "new troops," or Janissaries. Originally, the Janissaries were archers and crossbowmen. But when Hungarian and German shooters killed thousands of Turkish archers during the second battle of Kossovo in 1448, the Turks replaced the Janissaries’ bows with hand-cannons. Vigorous dancing was part of the Janissaries’ military training. The reason was that battalion chaplains were frequently members of the Bektashi Dervish order.
About 1398:
French and English knights grown tired of choreographed state tournaments organize their own private tournaments using real weapons and standard armor. Called à outrance ("to the limits"), these tournaments are sometimes claimed as ancestors for modern European dueling societies.
1398:
The Koreans establish the Songgyun’gwan ("National Confucian Academy") near Taejon. This makes it the oldest surviving Neo-Confucian school in what has since become the world’s most Confucianist society. Neo-Confucianism taught that civilized people conformed to existing social norms and avoided trying to change them. It also emphasized patrilinealism and primogeniture, rejected Buddhism as amoral and shamanism as obscene, and degraded the status of women. Therefore it held great appeal for the male leaders of Korea’s militaristic Choson Dynasty.
1398-1399:
Tamerlane invades India. Within six months, his army has sacked Delhi and Lahore, massacred at least 100,000 people, and returned to Samarkand with tens of thousands of the skilled masons the conqueror needed to make his capital the finest in Central Asia. Unlike his predecessors, Tamerlane had a plan for dealing with the Indian elephants, which had always before panicked Tatar and Mongol horses, thus making accurate archery impossible. The plan involved terrifying the Indian elephants before they had a chance to panic the Central Asian ponies. First, cavalry were issued caltrops to throw on the ground in front of advancing elephants. These would tear the elephants’ feet and madden them. Second, engineers and infantry lashed bundles of dried grass to buffaloes and camels, which were then soaked in oil and ignited as the elephants approached. The burning animals were then released to run toward the approaching elephants.
Fifteenth century:
According to Don Baltazar Gonzales of Manila, writing in 1800, Malay chieftains introduce Sufistic stick fighting entertainments into the Philippines.
1400:
The examinations for Korean soldiers expand to include tests on Sun Tzu’s Art of War. The idea was to exclude low-born people from high posts within the Choson military.
1402:
During a truce in the Hundred Years War, English and French soldiers compete in jousting, battle-ax fighting, and wrestling events. Commoners competed for prizes, while the knights competed, in the words of the Duke of Orleans, "for the love of the ladies and the fun of the thing." There were weight divisions in the wrestling events, and aristocrats competed straight up against commoners. Because gentlewomen were present, the contestants always wrestled fully clothed. Three undisputed falls were required for victory, and because of disputes, sometimes championship contests lasted for hours. (Indeed, the record, set at the Stockholm Olympics in 1912, is 11 hours, 40 minutes.) The judges at these events were known as "stycklers", a word that as "stickler" became a synonym for anyone who insisted on precise and exacting compliance with rules.
The Corporation of London starts holding an important fair every September. Known officially as Our Lady Fair (the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin is on September 8) and unofficially as the Southwark Fair (after its venue), it was one of England’s most popular fairs until prostitution, drunkenness, and hooliganism caused its closure in 1763. According to an engraving done by William Hogarth in 1733, entertainment offered at the Southwark Fair included stage plays, freak shows, acrobatic acts, and prizefighting.
A Franco-Castilian expedition lands on Lanzarote Island, in the Eastern Canaries. The subsequent enslavement of Lanzarote’s aboriginal population represents the beginnings of modern European overseas imperialism.
1403:
The Koreans build their first typesetting foundries. The idea was to make neo-Confucian documents more accessible to scholars.
1405:
A Chinese fleet visits Malaya. Its purpose was to impress the world with the glory and power of the newly organized Ming Dynasty. Its commander was a Muslim eunuch with a five-foot girth and a voice like a bell. Some say that the mostly Muslim sailors of this fleet introduced the leaping, darting, Islamic martial art called cha ch’uan to Southeast Asia. If so, then cha ch’uan is perhaps a Chinese root of the modern Malay martial art called berisilat, or "self-defense." However, the attribution is probably wrong. For one thing, Chinese Muslims did not routinely undergo martial art training until the arrival of Yemeni and Turkish Sufism in the seventeenth century. For another, Chinese immigrants were not common in Malaya until the 1840s. Therefore the Chinese roots of berisilat probably date to stories created during the Communist Emergency following World War II.
1406:
The training of the Christian knights of Seville is described as including torreo de rejoneo, or mounted bullfighting. The game required the riders to provoke wild bulls into charging, then killing the animals using a combination of elegant horsemanship and skilled sword and lance work. Although the roots of the game were Islamic, the games themselves were mostly played during Carnival.
East Asian governments often blamed peripatetic Buddhist monks for inciting local unrest. (The Buddhists promised a different, better, future, and argued, usually with good evidence, that human governments were corrupt.) To resolve the issue, the staunchly Confucian government of Korea orders the repression of most Buddhist processions and rituals. This repression was so thorough that by the sixteenth century Buddhism was publicly popular only with women. Accordingly, the modern stories about the Korean martial arts having been created by Buddhist monks probably represent dreaming rather than fact.
1409:
Christine de Pisan, the Italian-born daughter of a French court astrologer, publishes a book called Livre des Faits d’Armes ("Stories of Feats of Arms"). Hers was a vernacular study of military strategy and international law. It included original work alongside translations of Vegetius and Frontinius. It is also a reminder that medieval females could be as knowledgeable about military and political matters as was anyone else within their social or economic classes.
About 1410:
The Korean army holds subak, or hand-slapping, demonstrations during its annual military parades.
The Chinese build arrow-shooting firearms. The barrels of these weapons were made from tropical hardwoods. The idea has been attributed to Vietnamese soldiers serving in the Chinese army.
A swordsman of the Bolognese school named Fiore dei Liberi publishes Flos Duellatorum in Amris ("Flower of Battle"). Dedicated to Niccolo III d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, the manuscript combined illustrations with short rhyming captions. Armed methods shown included the use of two-handed swords, spears, and poleaxes; unarmed methods shown included disarming techniques and various trips and throws. In the prologue, dei Liberi said he studied both Italian and German schools, but gave the greatest credit to a Schwabian master named Johannes; presumably this was Johannes Liechtenauer.
About 1411:
The Spanish introduce serpentine musket fuses. These S-shaped devices held a lit slow-match above a powder-filled pan, and used a trigger mechanism to drop the match into the pan. The firearms themselves weighed about 16 pounds, and required gunners to fire them from tripods or gun-stakes. The rate of fire was 8-10 shots per hour. Effective range was about 50 yards.
1411:
According to tradition, two Thai princes resolve a dynastic dispute by agreeing to be bound by the results of a fight between picked champions. While this wager is often claimed as the first manifestation of muay Thai, or Thai boxing, that claim remains unsubstantiated, as the actual battle was with swords (dap).
About 1413:
Because the Taoists believed that ch’i (internal energy) developed fastest at places that were 2,000 to 4,000 feet higher than the surrounding territory, during the thirteenth century some of them started building hermitages in Hopei Province’s Wu Tang Mountains. These were generally dedicated to Hsüan-wu, the God of the North, a deity symbolized by the essence Yin, the element water, and the zodiac signs of the tortoise and snake. Under the Sung, Hsüan-wu was also the god of war, and as such the deity assumed even greater importance under the Ming, and in 1412 the Imperial government ordered major construction on temples in the region. During the seventeenth century, stories and stage plays made these monasteries the home of some famous martial art instructors, to include Chang San-feng. During the eighteenth century, stories began to claim that the Manchus were hiring Wu Tang Taoists to sack Buddhist temples in Hunan and Fukien provinces. There is considerable reason to doubt the latter story. First, monks normally do not personally attack one another; instead, they hire soldiers or thugs to do that type of work for them. Second, no one can show which temples were destroyed. Most importantly, no one can explain why Manchu generals would have needed help sacking lightly defended monasteries.
1415:
Good English archery and poor French leadership cause a repeat performance of Crécy at Agincourt.
1416:
Buddhist monks establish the Drepung monastery in Lhasa, Tibet. The name means "Rice Heap," and alludes to a Tantric Buddhist temple in India. This monastery housed over 7,000 monks in 1901, and was one of the largest Buddhist universities in the world until the Communist Chinese destroyed it in 1959.
A Crossbow Guild (Bogenschützen Gesellschaft) appears in Dresden. (While its organization flag shows an establishment date of 1286, its written records only date to 1416.) This was originally a municipal militia, and it was still holding contests in the twentieth century. Other long-standing urban crossbow guilds include the Brotherhood of Saint Sebastian in Bruges and the Guild of Crossbowmen in Zurich. Archers shot at popinjays (birds on poles) or targets set up 100 paces (85 meters) from the mark. Special target crossbows have been manufactured since the 1880s. The most accurate feature spirit levels and optical sights, and are capable of pinpoint accuracy to 30 meters. Meanwhile, modern hunting crossbows date to the 1950s, when they were developed for shooting tranquilizer darts into animals in Kenyan game parks.
About 1417:
Ottoman advances in Iran and the Balkans send the Gypsies scurrying into Eastern Europe and Egypt. Ethnically Kurdish, the Gypsies, who call themselves Romany, traced roots to northwestern India. Their religion was matristic, and influenced by Tantrism. Unlike most medieval people, Romany moved about freely, and maintained distinctive language and customs. The men often worked as tinkers, horse-traders, or musicians while women often worked as dancers or fortune-tellers. Social and religious differences caused both Muslims and Christians to persecute them, and this persecution continues into the present. The Hungarians, for instance, kept Romany slaves and during World War II the Dutch and French police happily sent Gypsies to German concentration camps, where the Nazis used them to test nerve agents. Consequently, medieval Romany bands usually displayed considerable defensive capability, and combative sports still practiced by Romany people include cudgeling and wrestling. The modern Romany wrestling style is oil wrestling. It looks similar to Turkish styles seen in the Balkans, and its champions are called pehlivani, after a Turkish word meaning "hero."
1419:
In Bohemia, the Czechs rebel against their German leaders. During their rebellion, the Czechs were united more by religious fervor than nationalism. In those days, there were several sitting Popes, more pretenders, and all were corrupt. Thus the Czechs were ready for a cleric (John Hus) who preached honesty and sobriety, and even better, encouraged laymen to take wine with their communion (a boon previously enjoyed only by aristocrats) and sing vernacular hymns in church. Militarily, the Czechs were organized under the leadership of the one-eyed Count Jan Zizka. Zizka was an experienced soldier who had led a Bohemian unit during the destruction of the Teutonic Brethren at Grunwald in 1410. Because he led a peasant army threatened by heavy cavalry, he decided that his best defense was to fortify his supply wagons, a notion apparently borrowed from the Russians. Each Czech wagon carried axes, spades, pick-axes, and hoes, and supported two hand gunners, six crossbowmen, two flail-carriers, four pikemen, two shield carriers, and two drivers. In the defense, the wagons were chained together and used as portable barricades, while in the offense, the wagons were rolled down hills into packed infantry formations, thus shattering them for the Hussite cavalry. Although Zizka died in 1424, the method of wagon-warfare he pioneered quickly became the Eastern European standard.
Tibetan monks establish the Se-ra, or "Merciful Hail," monastery at Lhasa. Because Tibetan political power rested in the hands of abbots and prelates, a corps of warrior-monks, or dob-dob, was also established at this monastery. By the late nineteenth century, the dob-dob were monastic police rather than soldiers. These men often worked as laborers or collectors of yak dung. Their training consisted of running in the hills, throwing stones at targets, practicing high and long jumping, and fighting with clubs and swords. (Firearms were viewed as noisemakers rather than killing machines.) Duelists fought using swords in the presence of an umpire. If both duelists fought honorably, then the duel ended at first blood, whereas if one or the other proved cowardly, then the coward might be killed. There were about 5,000 dob-dob at Se-ra in 1921.
About 1420:
South Indian merchants introduce Indo-Iranian equestrian games into Indonesia. Variations of these games are still played during planting festivals held on Sumba, Flores, and Java. In the game played on Sumba in the 1990s, for instance, the players carried long spears and galloped about circular runways trying to knock one another off their mounts. Women and children watched the matches, and they cheered and clapped loudly for their favorites. As for how the game was played in pre-modern times, a Dutch merchant named Veth watched a tournament at Mataram, on the island of Lombok, in 1666. The game started with the riders galloping around the field to the accompaniment of gamelan music. After that, the players charged one another. All players were careful to make sure that the prince was never unhorsed, and young players never seriously challenged older players. The reason was not solely fear nor undue respect. Instead, the Indonesians lacked a tradition of games that pitted force against force in which there could be only one winner.
Europeans begin corning their gunpowder. The process involved wetting the powder with human urine (preferably from a wine-drinking bishop, straight from the tap), then letting the powder dry. Once dry, the powder was sifted, resulting in a powder that burned hotter and misfired less. While hunters stored their powder in two separate horns – one for priming powder and one for the main charge – soldiers poured carefully measured loads into paper cartridges, and then hung them across their chests. While this looked bold and facilitated faster firing, it also made shooters vulnerable to exploding if struck by a spark.
1422:
The desire to find the legendary Presbyter John causes Prince Henry of Portugal to start sending ships west toward the Azores and south toward Cape Verde. The trick, finally learned around 1434, was to sail out of sight of the comforting African coast, as the prevailing winds and currents effectively prevented coast-hugging sailing ships from returning the way they came.
1426:
The Burgundians put notch-and-post sights on their arbalests and arquebuses. Military firearms still carry such sights because they give shooters faster target acquisition at normal ranges than aperture sights. They are also cheaper to manufacture and less prone to damage than optical sights, and less likely to be obscured by mud, rain, or battery failure than laser sights.
1427:
The Bohemians develop long-barreled handguns that looked like whistles. Hence their name, pistala, a word meaning "pipes." (The contemporary Turkish name for similar weapons was tüfek, or "blowpipe.")
1428:
The Castilian King Juan II comes to a Whitsunday tournament dressed as God. The King’s retainers were equally immodest, and came dressed as the Twelve Apostles. (Saint Paul replaced Judas Iscariot for the occasion.) This seemingly sacrilegious behavior is a reminder that soldiers and kings are rarely as pious as monks and churchmen would like.
About 1430:
Serbian Orthodox Christians acquire Italian hand cannons from the Ottomans. They then used these weapons against the Roman Catholics living in the Balkans.
1431:
The English burn a 19-year old Frenchwoman named Jeanne la Pucelle as a witch. Her actual crime was rallying peasants to the French flag. (She and some Scottish mercenaries had won some important battles, thus giving the peasants hope.) Burning deaths often took half an hour or more, especially when the wind was wrong. They were also enormously popular with the spectators, who cheered as the victim’s fat dripped from her fingertips, her lips shrank to her gums, and her bowels fell steaming into the flames. Jeanne la Pucelle was renamed Jeanne d’Arc (Joan the Archer) during the sixteenth century. The modern cult of Saint Joan dates to the 1890s, when French politicians decided to use the woman’s martyrdom to create a unifying national holiday. (Bastille Day, which the Catholics viewed as godless, and the Royalists viewed as an insult, was too controversial for this purpose.)
1432:
The Mamluks introduce arquebuses into Egypt. (Arquebus means "hook gun," and refers to the hook-like handles put on the underside of their barrels for the purpose of absorbing recoil.) As they scared horses and burned men’s hands and clothes, the new weapons were not popular with the Mamluk cavalry. Sudanese infantry, on the other hand, liked them. When the Mamluk Sultan Sa’adat Muhammad tried to increase the status of his Sudanese arquebusiers in 1497, Muhammad’s white cavalrymen killed the black officer in charge of Sudanese gunners, then told the Sultan, "If you wish to persist in these tastes, you had better ride by night and go away with your black slaves to far-off places."
About 1434:
The Portuguese King Duarte publishes Bem Cavalagar ("The Art of Good Horsemanship"). This short book, which was likely written throughout the 1420s, provides the most detailed and practical descriptions of late medieval European jousting techniques available.
About 1438:
By gradually conquering his neighbors, the Ninth Inca, known as Pachakuti ("The Transformer"), makes the Cuzqueño culture the dominant culture of south-central Peru. (The word inka is a Quechua word meaning "sovereign" or "aristocrat." Inca is its Spanish spelling.) Pachakuti’s army was a national levy based on age-sets. Its conscripts found themselves working on public works more often than they found themselves fighting. Whether working or fighting, the conscripts were lead by a cadre of professional soldiers, and organized into groups of tens, hundreds, and thousands. Military training included participation in royal hunts and free-for-all fights. There were also martial dances. Different social classes had different martial dances. During the aristocratic dances, for instance, the men passed a gold chain from hand-to-hand, while during the common dances, the men hopped and jumped. Inca hand-held weapons included copper-headed spears, stone-headed maces, and wooden clubs lined with flint or cold-hammered tin bronze. Ranged weapons included bows, slings, spear-throwers, and bolas. The latter were made of three stone balls joined by a cord. There were one and two ball variants of these weapons, with two balls used for bringing down small game, and one ball used during duels. Engineers used avalanches to disrupt or destroy armies on the move, and built stout masonry walls. Other physical defenses included llama-hide tunics stuffed with cotton batting, leather helmets, and wickerwork shields. Magical defenses, meanwhile, included witchcraft, prayer, and blood sacrifices. While llamas were the usual sacrificial victims, people were sometimes sacrificed on special occasions. Although the Incas had no writing, their communications were excellent. Messages were sent using knotted cords or tapestries. Post-runners carried these messages at an average rate of over six miles an hour, no mean feat in a land where the altitudes range from 11,000 to 14,000 feet.
1439:
Cosimo de’ Medici, Florence’s wealthiest merchant, hires Byzantine scholars to translate Plato’s works from Greek into Latin. Medici also hired agents to buy manuscripts wherever they could. The result was the resurgence in learning known as the Italian Renaissance.
English monastic laws prohibit nuns from "dancing and reveling" except at Christmas.
About 1440:
A Central Mexican priest named Tlacaelel popularizes the belief that the sun god would die unless he received a regular ration of human blood. This provides the ideology behind the Mexica-Tenochitlan, or Aztec, state. The Aztecs organized their armies in units of twenty. (Mexican mathematicians used base-twenty.) Twenty soldiers made a squad; twenty squads made a tiachcauh, or battalion; and twenty battalions made a xiquipile, or division. Their commanders and elite units were known as Eagle or Jaguar Knights, after their clan totems. All warriors normally painted their faces black, or a mottled red-and-white pattern, before battle. Aztec weapons included wooden swords edged with obsidian flakes that were sharper than Spanish steel, plus spear-throwers, bows and arrows, and slings. Their defenses included wooden helmets, hide-covered shields painted with clan totems, and knee-length tunics made of quilted cotton hardened by soaking in brine. (Many conquistadors also chose to wear this quilted armor after finding it was more comfortable than iron armor during hot weather.) Still, the Aztecs’ most potent weapon was the fear that their bloodthirsty rituals caused. The failure of these rituals to scare the Spanish out of their wits was one reason for the Aztec government’s fatalistic response to Hernán Cortés and his sixteenth century conquistadors.
Sigmund Ringeck, fencing master of Albrecht, Count Palatine of Rhine and Duke of Bavaria, produces an illustrated manuscript called "The Knightly Art of the Long Sword." The idea was to translate the esoteric terms used in Liechtenauer’s sword manual into colloquial German.
1441:
Portuguese mariners under the command of Antão Goncalves take ten Sanhaja captives in the Western Sahara. To stop this, a Moroccan ambassador told the Portuguese that black Africans made better slaves than Sanhaja and offered to sell them all the black slaves they could ever use. Ignoring the Moroccans’ self-serving logic, the Portuguese sent their own corsairing expedition to Senegambia in 1444. The outraged Senegambians responded with fleets of canoe-borne archers. Because the slow-firing Portuguese shipboard cannon were unable to hit fast-moving canoes, the Portuguese began negotiating regular trade treaties in 1448. Here, the Portuguese exchanged wire, beads, and manufactured goods for ivory, gold, and African slaves, a pattern that remained standard for the next three-and-a-half centuries.
About 1443:
Hans Talhoffer produces an illustrated manuscript called Fechtbuch ("Fighting Book"). Dedicated to some Schwabian nobles, the author’s personal copy dated 1459 is currently in Copenhagen. (The version reprinted in Prague in 1887 was based on an edition of 1467.) The description of armed techniques showed people fighting using dagger, long sword, staff, spear, and poleaxe, in armor and out, and on foot and on horseback. Wrestling was also shown. The armed methods were based in part on Liechtenauer’s teachings while the wrestling was "Master Ott’s wrestling art". The latter was Austrian wrestling, and Ott was a Jew.
About 1444:
The Byelorussians and Russians restrict the free movement of peasants to winter months. Obviously, not everyone paid attention to such laws. Those who did not often stole horses or rowing boats from their masters as they left. Such runaways called themselves Cossacks, after a Kirghiz Turkish word meaning "free men."
1444:
International spice merchants carry typhus throughout the Mediterranean world. The disease was indigenous to India, and is carried by lice.
1445:
Medieval soldiers were laid off during the winter, which was not campaigning season, and between wars. Disbanded soldiers then wandered about looting, raping, and pillaging just as if they were on campaign. To suppress such activities – which in peacetime were considered robbery and murder rather than war -- King Charles VII of France starts keeping some of the more reliable mercenary bands on retainer, and charging their leaders with suppressing the rest. While not exactly the establishment of a permanent standing army (that dates to the 1650s), this certainly represents a step toward the establishment of standing regiments.
1446:
King Sejong of Korea approves the introduction of the 28 characters of the modern Korean script. Although vastly superior to Chinese ideograms for writing the Korean language, Sejong’s script, known at the time as hunminjongum and today as han’gul, was used mainly by women, farmers, and common soldiers until the Japanese evacuation of Korea in 1945. The reason was that the Chinese-educated Korean aristocrats wanted to maintain their stranglehold on education.
1447:
King Henry VI makes Greenwich Palace an important royal residence. Amusements held on its 200-acre park included jousting, shooting at butts, wrestling, and mock military battles, and it was here that Sir Walter Raleigh reportedly put his cloak over a puddle so that Queen Elizabeth I would not soil her shoes. (While Hampton Court Palace was also popular, it had just a 50-acre park, and was better suited for banquets and tennis than mock military battles.)
1448:
Internal politics cause the Russian Orthodox Church to split from the Greek Orthodox Church. Because Greek Orthodox Christians resisted Muscovite evangelism, Russia did not have a native patriarch for another 150 years.
A book called Ch’ong-t’ong tungnok ("Records on Gunpowder Weaponry") appears in Korea. Printed in han’gul using moveable type, it describes the use of artillery in the field as well as during sieges.
1449:
The burghers of Nuremberg conduct Western Europe’s first comprehensive census. As the motivation was a threatened siege, the census doubtless had to do with tax collection. (Inhabitants of medieval German cities paid an occupation tax, and Nuremberg probably had more employed citizens than taxpayers.) The results were also highly confidential. The reason was that German princes were not above reopening tax rolls that had been closed for centuries in order to collect additional revenue. Frederick the Great, for instance, reportedly ordered German tax rolls examined as far back as 1221 to ensure that no one had ever underpaid the Prussian government.
The Milanese government begins replacing its arbalests with handguns.
About 1450:
Merchants spread Islam throughout the Hausa kingdoms of northern Nigeria.
A retired samurai named Choisai Ienao establishes the Tenshin Shoden Katori Shinto-ryu. This is Japan’s oldest documented martial art school. It is also the first school known to have taught techniques using kata, or pre-arranged patterns, rather than through free-fighting with wooden swords. The first part of the style’s name means "Divine Transmission Katori Shrine," and refers to the Katori Shrine in Honshu’s Chiba Prefecture. Meanwhile, the last part of the name, the word ryu, means as "flow," as in rivers. In East Asian cosmology, dragons symbolize rivers. Asian dragons have the virtues of saints (which may explain why the Byzantine Saint George was always fighting dragons), and in turn symbolizes some schools’ stated goal of making superior human beings out of their students. Nevertheless, Choisai was a noted spearman, and his techniques emphasized spear and naginata (halberd) work rather than swordsmanship.
A suit of armor is made for a German knight named Ulrich von Matsch, who stood nearly 6’7" tall. This is mentioned as a reminder that many medieval aristocrats stood more than 5’6" tall, and weighed more than 135 pounds. Why? Because people who eat regular well-balanced diets throughout childhood invariably grow five to six inches taller than do people who do not.
1451:
The Korean King Munjong views a military exercise at his palace. Seven hundred soldiers take part, and weapons demonstrated included hwacha, a rocket-launcher on a cartwheel.
1452:
The Portuguese build a water-powered sugar mill in the Azores. This represents the first important example of industrial production of a highly addictive substance. To keep up with the demand for field hands, the Portuguese started buying their slaves in West Africa around 1466. (Before that, most Portuguese slaves had come from Morocco, the Canary Islands, and southern Europe.)
Peter von Danzig produces a fencing manual (fechtbuch) that comments on the theories of Liechtenauer and other German masters regarding the use of sword-and-buckler, dagger, long sword, and wrestling. The book was mostly text, but did include a few illustrations.
1453:
The Ottoman Turks introduce mortars to the final siege of Constantinople. The weapons, known as bombards, were distinguished from cannons because they fired large projectiles using low firing pressures. These particular weapons threw half-ton stone balls at a rate of one round every two hours. Given enough time, they could batter their way through the thickest walls. The eventual Ottoman victory marks the end of the old Roman Empire. Modern European historians often claim that the fall of Constantinople fueled the Italian Renaissance. Perhaps this was so. After all, some Byzantine philosophers from Mystra (near Sparta on the Peloponnesian Peninsula) did flee to Italy in 1460. But it is not likely, as most Byzantine intellectuals moved to Crete rather than Florence or Rome. Accordingly, Cosimo de’ Medici’s passion for Plato in translation is probably more important to the Italian Renaissance than the fall of Constantinople.
Riots blamed on fixed matches and poor officiating follow some wrestling matches held at Clerkenwell, a London suburb noted for its brothels and taverns. The style of wrestling is not known, but London wrestling championships were often held on Good Friday.
About 1455:
Mechanical printing presses featuring movable metal type appear in Germany and Austria. These make books much less expensive and broadsheets (the ancestors of newspapers) possible. Best-sellers included The Frightening and Truly Extraordinary Story of a Wicked Blood-Drinking Tyrant Called Prince Dracula, published in Austria in 1463. (Although Bibles sold well, less than one literate person in twenty owned a complete Bible. Devout Catholics preferred love poetry, and even three centuries later, most Protestants preferred Psalms and catechisms to complete Bibles. Dracula, however, was loved by everyone except the pious, so outsold both Bibles and catechisms.)
1455:
The Burgundian nobility flocks to see a judicial duel between two burghers of Valenciennes named Plouvier and Mahuot. The burghers appear before the Duke of Burgundy with their heads shaved, feet bare, and bodies coated in grease and sewn into leather garments. The duelists salute the duke and kiss the Bible, then rub their hands in ashes and eat some sugar. Then they take up bucklers (small round shields) with the images of saints on them, and medlor wood staves. Mahuot starts the brawl by throwing sand into Jacotin’s face. Outraged, Jacotin drops his weapons and starts wrestling. His technique is to gouge Mahuot’s eyes with his thumbs. Mahuot stops this by biting Jacotin’s fingers. Undeterred, Jacotin then twists Mahuot’s arms until he screams for mercy. The Duke of Burgundy has no mercy this day, and Mahuot is dragged from the lists by the guards and hanged. As for the knights, they express embarrassment about the result, and leave to watch a proper joust.
1455-1485:
In a series of armed brawls Sir Walter Scott later graces with the name "the Wars of the Roses," the house of York loses control of the English Parliament to the Lancasters and Tudors. Wealthy Englishmen often paid both sides rather than choose one side. These mugwumps called themselves "gentlemen," and demanded the right of signing "Esquire" after their names instead of "Sir" before them.
1457:
The Scottish Parliament bans golf. The reason was the game diverted gentlemen from their archery practice. The aristocrats played on.
Crusaders returning from wars in Hungary introduce the Ottoman Turkish practice of maneuvering cavalry using trumpets and horse-mounted kettledrums into France and Germany.
About 1460:
The wooden swords known as bokuto become popular in Japanese swordsmanship academies. These weapons were similar to the baleen ("whalebone") swords contemporary Europeans used during their own tournaments and jousts, and served the same purpose, namely reducing the severity of accidental injuries.
Paulus Kal (or Kall), a swordsmanship instructor for a Bavarian duke, produces an illustrated manual called The Fencing and Wrestling Pictures of Paulus Kal.
1460:
King James II of Scotland is killed when one of his siege guns bursts outside Roxburgh. Bursting guns were not the only way that chemically-powered weapons killed their users. For example, powder horns could also catch fire, killing or injuring their wearers. Fratricide was a problem, too. For instance, during the English Civil War battle of Basing House in 1643, the rear ranks of the poorly trained Parliamentary troops fired into their own front ranks, and as recently as 1993, the United States Army admitted that 5% of its battle casualties came from "friendly" fire. And these numbers didn’t even include intentional killings. After all, there was no ballistics on buckshot in a world before microscopes or forensic pathologists.
1461:
Burgundian mercenaries introduce arquebuses into Britain. Still, the British nobility preferred longbows and as a result English royal bodyguards did not begin re-equipping with firearms until the 1480s. There were several reasons for this antipathy toward firearms. Arrows, said British authors, were more frightening to men and more painful to horses. Furthermore, archers were not blinded by smoke, and shot much faster, more accurately, and at longer ranges. On the other hand, replied the pro-gunners, archers had to stand up to shoot, unlike gunners, who could lie on the ground. More importantly, it took years to train an archer and just a few weeks to train a shooter.
1462:
Prince Vlad of Wallachia introduces the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II to total war. Vlad’s methods included poisoning wells, sending plague victims and lepers to spread disease inside Turkish camps, and impaling prisoners of war. (A stickler for protocol, Vlad always ensured that generals received higher stakes than did their men.) Vlad learned his war craft from the Hungarian soldier John Hunyadi during the late 1440s, who in turn had learned his craft fighting the Hussites. Thus, he fought using a combination of wagons, firearms, cavalry, and archery. (Saxon artisans living in the Transylvanian towns of Brasov and Sibiu made Vlad’s firearms and powder.) By Slavic standards, Vlad was a rational despot. After all, he waged war against the infidel, protected honest merchants and hard-working peasants, and atoned for his sins by founding churches and monasteries. Consequently, the Russian Grand Duke Ivan III used Feodor Kuritsyn’s The Story of Prince Dracula as a primer on statecraft. Unfortunately, most of Vlad’s posthumous reputation is owed to less flattering stories written by Muslims and Western Europeans. For example, due to his unpleasant way of dispatching prisoners, the Germans and Ottomans called him Vlad the Impaler. The Greek Orthodox, meanwhile, were aghast at his conversion to Roman Catholicism, and declared that he became a vampire after death. And, to top things off, in 1890 Bram Stoker decided to write a novel of steamy Victorian sensuality, and decided that he liked the sound of the words "Dracula" and "Transylvania."
1464:
A West African prince named Sunni Ali begins a series of almost annual wars of expansion. These ultimately turn his small Saharan kingdom into the Empire of Songhai. Subsequent hagiography notwithstanding, Sunni Ali was probably an animist rather than a Muslim, as his persecutions of the imams of Timbuktu are legendary.
1466:
In England, a Yorkist earl named Sir John Tiptoft publishes the Ordinances, Statutes, and Rules of jousting. Tiptoft’s rules awarded points for unhorsing riders, breaking spears by crashing them together tip-to-tip, and so on. They disqualified players for low blows and unauthorized weapons. Winners received prizes from the queen or other ladies present. Sir John was later hanged for impaling Lancasterian prisoners.
1467:
Japanese aristocrats hire appraisers to assign monetary values to their presentation-grade swords. The most famous of these appraisers was Amidabutsu Myohon, who worked for the Tokugawa family. To judge quality, appraisers looked at the blade and its markings. Then they took the sword to a butcher to see and hear it cut. (A good cut sounded like a wet towel being snapped, while a poor one merely thunked.) While legends tell of sword-testers severing bodies at the hips and firearms across their barrels, both World War II prisoner killings and the suicide of novelist Mishima Yukio in 1970 suggest that Japanese swordsmen often required several blows to sever a head from the neck, and a cutting torch to sever a gun barrel. The similar stories about samurai testing swords on passers-by date to the seventeenth century, and describe the actions of some Japanese gangsters known as the kabuki-mono, or "crazy ones." Of course, battle-crazed infantry unhampered by theoretical instruction may have been equally redoubtable, as there are reliable reports of MacDonald Highlanders splitting English soldiers almost in half at Killiecrankie in 1689. Generally, though, such cutting is a show of ego. After all, a slash across the throat is just as lethal as splitting a man in two -- and tactically wiser, because it is less likely to damage the weapon used.
1469:
While imprisoned on charges of rape, robbery of churches, and theft of deer and cattle, an English knight named Sir Thomas Malory writes a romantic novel called Le morte d’Arthur ("The Death of Arthur"). Upon publication by William Caxton in 1485, this book provided the definitive version of the Arthurian legend. It also helped codify literary English, as Caxton always edited his books to appear as if written in the London vernacular.
About 1470:
Portuguese navigators start suspecting that Africa is a circumnavigable island instead of an impassable barrier.
The French introduce trunnions. These allowed lightweight cannon to be suspended from wheeled carriages, and rapidly transported about the battlefield.
The Japanese raise large armies of conscript light infantry known as ashigaru, or "light feet." The training the ashigaru received was inferior to that of provincial samurai. The vast numbers of inexpensive weapons and helmets needed to equip the ashigaru are important for inspiring the Japanese to develop mass-production techniques.
1471:
The armies of Ivan III conquer Novgorod. This puts Moscow in charge of Great White Russia. Ivan’s excuse was an alliance between the Orthodox burghers of Novgorod and the "satanic" Roman Catholics of Lithuania and Poland.
1472:
The Kurds acquire artillery from the Ottoman Turks.
King Edward IV requires merchants to import four yew bowstaves for every ton of other goods they carried into England. Most of this yew came from Portugal. And that explains the historic ties between the British and Portuguese governments.
1473:
European mercenaries were usually hired as independent organizations called "companies." Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy, was the first to organize his mercenaries into separate companies of archers, pike-and-musket men, and cavalry. (Artillerists were still independent civilian contractors.) In this way, Charles created the vertical structuring of the modern European army.
Pope Sixtus IV starts construction on a private fortress he called the Sistine Chapel. Michaelangelo’s magnificent frescoes are not ordered for eight years, or completed for forty.
The Muscovite Grand Duke Ivan III marries the Byzantine princess Zoë Palaeologus. As Zoë was the only niece of the last Byzantine emperor, this marriage allowed future Muscovite leaders to call their empire the successor of Byzantium, their capital the third Rome, and themselves the new Caesars. Ivan III is also remembered for his refusal to kiss the stirrup of the ambassadors of the Golden Horde in 1474, and for effecting the practical liberation of Muscovy from the Horde in 1480. Russian historiography notwithstanding, this Muscovite autonomy owes more to dissension within the Turkish ranks than any actions undertaken by the Russians.
1474:
The Swiss establish the Société de l’Harquebuse at Geneva, making it the country’s first gun club. As in modern shooting sports, the shooters fired at black bull’s-eyes surrounded by concentric rings. As the targets stood 200 yards from the firing line, weapons probably included rifles as well as arquebuses.
About 1475:
A German fencing master named Hans Lecküchner writes a manuscript on the use of the German short sword. In 1558, the book is attributed to Hans Lebkommer, given upgraded engravings by Hans Brosamer, and published as Der alten Fechter gründliche Kunst ("Complete Art of the Olden Fencers").
1475:
Gonorrhea forces an English army to evacuate France. Explained the chronicler, the soldiers "fell to the lust of women, and their penises rotted away and fell off and they died."
1477:
Germans produce brass cannon in Prussia. The weapons were then used during Crusades against the Poles and Lithuanians.
About 1478:
King Louis XI becomes the first king since Charlemagne to collect taxes from every duchy in France. The reason was that King Louis had more cannons and mercenaries than his rivals, which in turn meant that if they refused to pay, he could huff and puff and blow their castles down.
About 1480:
Cranequins, or windlass-cranked crossbows, appear in Europe. Although slow to reload, this was not a particular problem as they were effectively crew-served weapons – one man loaded a series of the devices while another took aim and shot. Further, they were smaller, thus easier to operate inside fortifications than previous crossbows. Finally, they had greatly improved stocks and triggers. Unfortunately, they were very expensive to manufacture and maintain, and consequently they were available only to wealthy hunters and royal bodyguards. A Spaniard writing in 1644 described shooting one as follows: "As [the shooter] holds the stock and the trigger in [his right hand], he should raise his thumb close to his eye. When the head of the arrow can be seen above the top of the thumb, he takes aim as he chooses and in this way he will strike his game." The writer, Alonzo Martinez del Espinar, added that the weapons were accurate to about 25 yards. Beyond that, the shooter had to compensate for the strength of the bow and the fall of the shot. Still, pinpoint accuracy was not necessary, as hunting arrows were always dipped in powerful vegetable poisons.
1480:
During a battle with the Golden Horde along the Urga River, the Russian cavalry carried Turkish bows while the Russian infantry carried arquebuses and pikes. This is the first known use of firearms in the field by the Russians.
1482:
Christopher Columbus broaches his idea of reaching Japan by sailing west. The idea occurred to him after a careful reading of Marco Polo and some Greek and Arab apocrypha. The Portuguese rejected the idea because Columbus’ mathematics and knowledge of the Western Sea were weak, while the Spanish rejected it because it described a world different from the one described by Saint Augustine.
Portuguese merchants build their first fortified trading post on Ghana’s Akan coast. The stone storerooms of São Jorge de Mina (modern Elmina) were the first permanent European structures in sub-Saharan Africa. Their purpose was to hold gold dust and ivory until there was enough to warrant shipping. When the Dutch captured São Jorge in 1637, they converted the fort’s storerooms into slave-pens.
1484:
Pedro de Vera builds the first sugar mill in the Canary Islands. As the Canary Islanders fought slavery, workers included European indentured servants and West African slaves.
About 1485:
Leonardo da Vinci sketches some wheel-lock firing mechanisms, and by 1510, the Venetians were making combination wheel-lock/crossbows. Wheel-locks worked on the same principle as a modern cigarette lighter. That is, they created sparks by striking pyrites with serrated steel wheels. This had obvious value for people wanting to carry concealed weapons or shoot firearms from horseback. But the weapons were far from perfect. Drawbacks included expense, forty moving parts, and an easily lost winding key. Therefore wheel-locks were carried mainly by merchants, cavalrymen, and kings.
The Aztecs introduce a form of gladiatorial combat they called the War of the Flowers. The Aztecs who participated in these battles were usually the sons of wealthy merchants. Their opponents were usually war captives offered the opportunity to die bravely in battle or to die miserably in slavery. Unsurprisingly, the Aztecs invariably won these "contests."
1485:
Portuguese merchants arrive at Benin City, in southern Nigeria. The Portuguese described the Bini soldiers as carrying iron swords, wooden shields, and iron-tipped spears. Their arrows were poisoned. Pictures of the Bini secret society known as the Leopard Hunters Guild show warriors wearing helmets and armor made from anteater skin. The armor was magical as well as practical. (The scaly anteater is one of the few West African animals capable of resisting leopards.) Most West African weapons and defenses were attributed with magical powers, and one purpose of the Leopard Hunters Guild was to control and administer those powers.
The Bodyguard of the Yeoman of the Guard is established in London. Its original purpose was to provide security during the coronation of England’s King Henry VII. The oldest extant royal bodyguard, the Beefeaters’ white crossbelts originally supported the weight of an arquebus. So, while its uniform is archaic today, it was state-of-the-art in the fifteenth century.
1486:
Sword dances are outlawed in Vitoria, Spain. The reason was "the scandalous behaviour and shedding of blood occasioned by them." Iberian dances of the era often feigned combat between Moors and Christians. Hence, the English term "Morris dancing." Besides patriotism, their purposes included impressing women.
About 1487:
In Padua, Italy, a fencing master named Fillipe Vadi produces a manuscript called De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi ("About the Gladiatorial Art of Fighting"). Vadi was from Pisa but taught fencing at Urbino. He believed that fencing was as much about ethics as technique, and that the knights and nobles who learned it should use their art to protect rather than oppress. Although the pictures suggest that his methods were similar to those of dei Liberi half a century earlier, the names for the techniques are different, which in turn suggests that masters modified both names and positions to suit their needs.
1487:
The city of Worms hosts Germany’s last major chivalric tournament.
Der Hexenhammer, or "The Hammer of Witches," lists the ways that people could invoke Satanic aid during shooting practice. These included stealing consecrated wafers during Mass, casting bullets at crossroads on Christmas Eve, and attending shooting schools taught by Old Nick himself.
The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III authorizes guild masters to wear feathers in their caps and swords at their sides. In other words, he granted them the same privileges as the lower aristocracy.
1489:
A German book on commercial arithmetic introduces - and + into European mathematics. Their original purpose was to show shortages and surpluses during warehouse inventories, and they only took on their modern mathematical meanings in 1514.
About 1490:
German mercenary companies contractually define military good order and discipline. These contracts are the forerunners of modern European codes of military justice.
A Bavarian silk merchant named Hanns Wurm publishes an illustrated wrestling manual (Ringersbuch).
1490:
The Venetian army replaces its arbalests with firearms. In 1506 the Venetians built firing ranges throughout their city, and in 1508 they even issued muskets to militia units.
The Japanese sword hero (kengo) Tsukahara Bokuden is born in Hitachi Prefecture. While Tsukahara fought over 100 duels and participated in 37 battles during his 81-year lifetime, his only wounds came from archers.
1491:
Portuguese merchants introduce Venetian glass and Roman Catholicism into Zaire. While the Kongolese monarch was among the first converts to Christianity, not everyone was happy with the Portuguese, including the noble Mpanzu a Nzinga, who feared the Portuguese and their priests. The Kongolese military had about 20,000 soldiers. The army was organized as infantry, musicians, and priests. Uniforms consisted of palm leaves, animal skins, and feathered headdresses. Defensive weapons included buffalo hide shields and drums. Magical weapons included wooden bells, rattles, and fetishes. Offensive weapons included bows with iron-tipped arrows, wooden clubs, bone or metal tipped lances, and poisoned stakes. The soldiers worked themselves into martial fury using leaping war dances. (After three days of dancing and chanting, the army was judged ready for war.) A single battle usually decided a war, with the defeated side fleeing for home and the victorious side pursuing.
1492:
The German cosmographer Martin Behaim makes the Erdapfel ("Earth Apple"). This is the oldest terrestrial globe still in existence. While Behaim’s globe did not show the Americas, Australia, or Antarctica, it did show the Azores and other Atlantic islands. Accordingly, Columbus’ "discovery" of the Americas better describes the Iberian aristocracy’s discovery of the riches to be made via the Atlantic trade than any actual geographical findings.
Muslim Granada falls to Castilian cannons and internal treachery.
The Spanish Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia becomes Pope Alexander VI. The evil deeds attributed to this Pope by his enemies included having children by his daughter Lucrezia, poisoning his rivals, and introducing asphyxiating gases to siege warfare. While none of the latter calumnies are true, they do make delightful gossip.
1493:
Christopher Columbus and his men introduce syphilis into Italy. At least, so goes a mid-sixteenth century theory concerning the source of the deadly syphilis epidemic that ravaged Europe during the winter of 1493-1494. The modern theory is that this was simply a coincidental development of an exceptionally deadly permutation of an ancient disease.
The Songhai emperor Muhammad ibn abu Bakr Ture justifies his wars of expansion in the southern Sahara as jihads meant to spread orthodox Islam throughout the region.
1494:
The Scottish monk John Cor double-distills a malt beverage he calls aqua vitae. The Gaelic translation of this Latin term for the "water of life" was uisge beatha, which in turn passed into English as "whisky". "Proof" of whisky’s strength involved mixing the spirits with gunpowder and then igniting it; if the powder flashed, then the alcohol content was "proved." However, the process of double-distilling alcohol in copper pots was expensive; Cor, for example, required 48 bushels of malted barley. So, until the advent of commercial distilleries in the 1690s, whisky was drunk mostly at weddings, funerals, and similar family or clan occasions. During these gatherings, Highland men and boys competed in rough games such as archery, singlestick, sword-and-buckler fencing, and wrestling. At night, they also did sword dances and told stories in rhyme.
By running his finger along a line on a map, Pope Alexander VI divides the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal. (Spain got everything west of the line, while Portugal got everything east.) Unsurprisingly, the English, French, Germans, and Dutch (to say nothing of the Africans, Americans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders) ignored this decision.
Double-entry bookkeeping develops in Italy; a Croat, Benko Kotruljic, wrote the earliest known book on the subject.
About 1495:
William Renwick makes a 24-bore hunting rifle for the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. As its rifling was intended to act as a reservoir for powder ash between cleanings, all corresponding improvements in accuracy were entirely serendipitous. Still, rifling made the weapons much more accurate. For instance, during some tests held in Mainz in 1547, a rifle firing lead bullets hit a target 20 times out of 20 at a range of 200 yards. The usual fifteenth century target was a round wooden target about three feet in diameter. Butt markers ran out between shots to mark shots with wooden plugs. Anywhere on the target constituted a hit.
1496:
A traveler named Romano Pane introduces the Arawak practice of inhaling tobacco through a straw into Spain. Dipping snuff does not become popular in Europe until about 1560, nor smoking pipes or cigars until around 1580. (One English tradition describes a servant throwing ale on Sir Walter Raleigh because he thought Raleigh was on fire, but that story is probably apocryphal.)
1497-1498:
Vasco da Gama rounds the Cape of Good Hope, and reaches India soon after. This was probably with the help of a Gujarati navigator picked up in Mombassa.
About 1499:
The Sikh religion, which borrowed tenets of faith from both Hinduism and Islam, appears in the Punjab. Although people from all social classes embraced it, the new religion was especially popular with farmers and townsmen excluded from power by both Brahmans and Muslims. Like Rajputs, Sikhs could not eat beef or pork, but could eat lamb and fowl, and attributed steel with almost sacred powers. One unusual Sikh weapon was a sharpened steel washer measuring about seven inches in diameter. Known as a chakra, or "circle," aristocratic Sikhs often carried two or three stuffed inside their turbans, and amused themselves by twirling them around their forefingers and then flicking them toward targets; Xena, Warrior Princess is of course the most famous chakra user in recent memory. More important personal weapons for Sikh soldiers, though, included swords, bucklers, lances, and daggers. The stick art that Sikhs used to train in swordsmanship is known as gatka.
1499:
A Spanish expedition under the command of Alonso de Ojeda explores Colombia’s Caribbean coast. After hearing Arawak stories about the Muisca Indians, who showered their lake-dwelling gods with gold dust, Ojeda creates the myth of El Dorado, the Indian City of Gold.
About 1500:
Italian alchemists describe magic as being black or white. Black magic was magic done against God’s will, while white magic was magic done with God’s blessing. The medical arts, which included alchemy and astrology, were the most important kind of white magic.
The Iranian Shah Isma’il I makes Shi’ism the paramount Islamic faith in Azerbaijan and Iran. Isma’il was also an avid physical culturalist, and the modern Zour Khaneh (Iranian academies of physical training) owe much to his patronage. The traditional Iranian gymnasium had high domed ceilings and stamped earth floors, and was designed to resemble a mosque or religious shrine. The Iranian training featured whirling dances accompanied by bells, drums, and chants. This probably reflects Dervish practice, as Dervishes were often military chaplains. Lifting weights and juggling heavy clubs was a regular part of the training regimen. Accessories included kabadeh, iron bows weighing between 25 and 50 pounds, mil, mace-like wooden clubs weighing between 10 and 100 pounds, and seng, horseshoe-shaped wooden shields weighing 100 pounds or more. The Iranian athletes also wrestled. Why? Because, in the words of a modern wrestling chant, "In wrestling according to the rules, one prepares himself for war." Indian influence was obvious, as the wrestlers trained using hundreds of dipping pushups, and massaged and bathed using dust and oil following training. Turkish influence was apparent, too, as the wrestlers wore leather pantaloons and wrestled from standing positions. (Modern Iranian wrestling, with its swimming motions, probably dates to the seventeenth century.)
The straight-bladed rapier known as the Toledo appears in Spain. The design is important because it evolved into the modern epee.
1500:
Pisan engineers find that reverse-sloped walls of loosely packed dirt successfully resist penetration by cannon balls. This discovery quickly leads to the construction of angular, powder-resistant bastions known as "star-forts." European monarchs’ ability to hold and maintain these star-forts created the modern European frontiers.
1500-1530:
Although plate armor was vulnerable to both gunfire and crossbow bolts on the battlefield, it remained useful on the jousting field. So some of the finest suits of armor ever made date to the early sixteenth century. Indeed, the patronage of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, who dearly loved to joust, is why modern museum curators call sixteenth-century armors "Maximilian."
1502:
After Arawak slaves prove unable to survive the combination of overwork and unfamiliar Eurasian diseases, the Spanish start shipping disease-resistant West African slaves to the West Indies. By 1511, European merchants operating out of Sao Tomé and Mbanza have turned slave trading into big business. The way it worked was that African monarchs waged war on their neighbors, and then traded prisoners of war for glass, metal, cloth, liquor, and other manufactured goods. As for how this affected the unfortunate captives, read about the way the Japanese treatment of Allied prisoners during World War II and you have an insiders’ view on the subject.
The Italians enliven a Roman comedy staged at Ferrara with intermissions featuring satyrs chasing wild beasts and soldiers doing sword dances. Said a contemporary critic, "Neither the verses nor the voices struck me as very good, but the Moorish dances between the acts were very well danced." Those "Moorish" dances were probably morisca, a kind of Spanish sword dance that was popular with both soldiers and common folk.
About 1503:
The Siamese King Rama T’ibodi II orders the compilation of a "Treatise on Victorious Warfare" that outlined the causes of war, military strategy, and military tactics. In this versified Thai text, much emphasis was placed on ensuring that the army followed proper astrological and geomantic procedures, a little emphasis was placed on sending cavalry out ahead of the infantry and the carts, and no emphasis was placed on hand-to-hand combat. (The 21 Rules of combat tacked on at the end, the ones that encourage soldiers to "strike in the night… and burn the enemy’s camp," date to a later Thai general, who for what it is worth proved a whole lot more successful in combat.) Thai and Burmese battlefield weapons of the era included bows, crossbows, lances, javelins, and swords. In the field, armor consisted of leather shields and bamboo helmets, but during sieges leather coats and sandals were also worn.
1504:
Handguns begin to figure in Irish violence. However, the principal killing weapon at the first battle known to have used handguns (Knockdoe, near Galway) continued to be axes, and the Irish gunmen were apparently as likely to use their firearms as clubs as for shooting.
1505:
The aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands are reported starting their duels by hurling round stones at one another. The duelists could dodge the incoming missiles with their bodies, but could not move their feet. If the stones missed (which they frequently did, usually because their targets dodged them rather than because the throwers’ aim was off), then the men would run toward each other and belabor one another with sticks until one or the other became too tired or bloody to continue. Little else is known about the ancient combative sports of these people, known as the Guanche, as Portuguese slave traders, soldiers, and diseases had by this time almost exterminated them. (While the modern Guanche have a distinct culture, it includes many West African and Portuguese practices. Their sports, including their wrestling and quarterstaff games, probably share equally diverse roots.)
1506:
The Sultan of Calicut in India hires Italian technicians to build cannon for the defense of his city.
1507:
The German cosmographer Martin Waldseemüller publishes 1,000 copies of a map showing the name "Terra America" about where Brazil should be. The name honored the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci, who sailed along the Brazilian coast in 1502.
1508:
The English government prohibits commoners from hunting with crossbows.
1509:
A monument is built at Shuri, Okinawa, to honor the accomplishments of the Ryukyuan King Sho Shin. In 1926, the Okinawan scholar Iha Fuyu interprets that part of the monument reading "Swords and bows and arrows exclusively are accumulated as weapons in the protection of the country" to mean that the king had ordered the collection of all the iron weapons in the country. In 1987, Professor Mitsugu Sakihara of the University of Hawaii showed that this was a misinterpretation of the text, and that King Sho Shin was actually stockpiling arms rather than suppressing them.
Pietro Monte, a Spaniard living in Italy, publishes Exercitiorum atque atris militaris collectanea, Europe’s oldest known published wrestling manual. A master of the Bolognese school, Monte also wrote books on fencing, physical fitness, and dueling.
About 1510:
Viewing words as responses to specific situations rather than universal recipes, the Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yang-ming admonishes his students against taking anything anyone’s words, including his own, too seriously. Nevertheless, Wang’s students often took Wang’s words very seriously, and his argument that all human existence was decided by the balancing of i ("patterns") with ch’i ("energy") became very popular during the seventeenth century.
Matchlock arquebuses enter service throughout Europe. Shooters normally carried powder in pre-loaded paper cartridges that were carried underneath the coat to keep them dry. When action was imminent, shooters lit cloth fuses ("matches"). Shooters held the burning matches in their left hands except when firing. Inexperienced shooters sometimes blew themselves up by forgetting to remove the match from their fingers when reaching for a new cartridge. A single shooter used perhaps a third of a pound of match per day. This made resupply a problem during sieges. Bullets were hand-made, and mass-produced bullets often had to be cut or bit into the correct size. This was the main reason why ammunition-grade matchlocks could be slow to reload.
1510:
According to an advertising brochure published by a seventeenth century descendant, a Japanese artisan named Miochin Nobuiye becomes the first Japanese armorer to sign his work. The veracity of this statement is dubious, as the same descendant also provided fictitious statements of authenticity to his customers.
1511:
A Portuguese fleet commanded by Affonso de Albuquerque captures the Malayan Peninsula seaport of Malaka. The conquest was fairly easy, partly because the Malakans were Javanese in a world of Malays (thus they lacked reliable local allies) and mostly because they had believed themselves under the protection of the Thais. Still, upon discovering their error, the Malakans counterattacked with considerable vigor. Indeed, the Malay word for warrior, amok, has since become synonymous with martial rage. While the Europeans tended (and tend) to attribute such berserk fury to drug abuse, it was more likely due to Sufi-influenced trance dancing. Islamic jihadists still live in the region, and as recently as March 1967, the Indonesian army needed special commandos to shoot down Mbah Ruro, an Islamic mystic who believed that sufficient faith rendered people bulletproof.
1512:
The school of Albrecht Dürer produces a series of 120 wrestling and 48 fencing paintings, perhaps as an anatomy study intended to catch the eye of the Emperor Maximilian. The pictures were not drawn from life, but were instead based on pictures contained in older manuscripts such as the Wallerstein Codex (ca. 1470). The complete set was not published until 1910 (Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses, Band XXVII, Heft 6: Albrecht Dürers Fechtbuch by Friedrich Dörnhöffer).
1513:
European politicians begin preferring cannons to trebuchets, probably because they liked the firearms’ noise and phallicism. As Pope Julius exclaimed to his aide while en route to the siege at Mirandola, "Now we’ll see whose balls are bigger, mine or Louis’s!" The Chinese also attributed sexual significance to artillery pieces. During the Wang Lun uprising of 1774, for instance, besieged Ch’ing forces countered White Lotus incantations using counter-spells made from the blood and urine of menstruating prostitutes. Likewise, during the siege of Chekiang in 1861-1862, T’ai-p’ing rebels had prostitutes take off their trousers and moon the attacking government forces in the belief that this