Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

116 Europe
handsprings, cartwheels, and handstands, and created a system of selfdefense
that could be performed when manacled. Following emancipation
in the nineteenth century, capoeira became associated with the urban criminal.
This association kept the art in the streets and underground until well
into the twentieth century. Currently, the art is practiced in what is regarded
as the more traditional Angola form and the Regional form that
shows the influence of other (perhaps even Asian) arts. In either form,
however, capoeira is a martial art that developed in the New World.
The origins of savate are equally controversial, but it is known that by
the end of the seventeenth century, French sailors fought with their feet as
well as their hands. Although savate is the best known, various related
foot-fighting arts existed throughout Europe. Like capoeira, savate began
as a system associated with the lower and criminal classes but eventually
found a following in salles similar to those European salons devoted to
swordsmanship. Savate, in fact, incorporates forms using canes, bladed
weapons, and wrestling techniques. A sporting form of savate—Boxe
Française—survives into the contemporary period, as well as a more selfdefense-oriented
version—Danse de rue Savate (loosely, “Dance of the
Street Savate”). Modern savate (especially Boxe Française) incorporates
many of the hand strikes of boxing along with the foot techniques of the
original art. Among the practitioners of this outstanding fighting art were
Alexandre Dumas and Jules Verne. Indeed, the character of Passepartout in
Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days is a savate expert who is
called upon to save his employer.
Despite gaps in the historical record, it is apparent that for better than
two millennia unarmed combat was developed, refined, and practiced by
cultures as empires rose and fell. Armed combat shifted and changed with
the advent of new and improved military technology. Clearly, fighting systems
that required sophisticated training and practice have been in use in
the “Western” regions of the globe as long as many Asian martial arts.
The development of firearms, however, led to an unprecedented technological
revolution in Western military science that radically changed
ideas of warfare and personal safety in that sector of the world. By the late
1600s, the firearm was the principal tool of personal and battlefield combat,
and all practical armor was useless against it. The availability of pistols
discouraged the use of rapiers or small-swords for personal defense or
as dueling weapons. At the time of the American Civil War, repeating revolvers
and rifles, Gatling guns, and cannons loaded with grapeshot ensured
that attempts to use swords and cavalry charges against soldiers
armed with such weapons would end as massacres.
In the twentieth century the West “discovered,” and in many cases redefined,
Asian martial arts and recovered many of their own fighting tra-