Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

1541 Pedro de Valdivia leads a military expedition whose members include
his mistress, Inés Suárez, overland from Peru into central Chile.
About 1545 Women begin playing female roles on the French stage.
The practice spreads to Italy around 1608, and Britain around 1658. The
reason for the change was that dowryless females were willing to work for
less money than the men and boys who had traditionally played female
roles.
1561 Mochizuki Chiyome, the wife of the Japanese warlord
Mochizuke Moritoki, establishes a training school for female orphans and
foundlings. The skills the girls learned included shrine attendant, geisha,
and spy. While Mochizuki-trained geisha are sometimes claimed as the first
female ninja, it is more likely that the women were simply prostitutes
trained to remember and repeat whatever they heard from their carefully
selected patrons.
About 1590 A chronicler named Abu Fazl describes the harem of the
Mughul emperor Akbar as housing about 5,000 women. About 300 of
these women were wives; the rest were servants and guards. The guards
were mostly from Russia and Ethiopia, and were little more than armed
slaves. There were exceptions, of course, and one of Akbar’s chief rivals in
the 1560s was a warrior-queen named Rani Durgawati.
1601 A Javanese prince named Sutawijaya Sahidin Panatagam dies.
Throughout his life, the man’s courage and luck were legendary, and he reportedly
forgave would-be assassins by saying that daggers could not pierce
the skin of a man who was protected by the gods. He took this belief seriously,
too, as his concubines included an east Javanese woman who introduced
herself to him by attacking him with some pistols and butterfly
knives.
1606 The Iberian navigator Quiros visits the Tuamotus Archipelago,
and observes its Polynesian inhabitants wrestling. Both men and women
wrestled, and there were sometimes mixed bouts. The audience defined the
ring by standing around the participants. The wrestling was freestyle, and
hair pulling was allowed.
1611 The Mughul emperor Jahangir falls in love with an Iranian
widow named Mehrunissa. The emperor’s fascination is not surprising, as
Mehrunissa was a gifted poet, competent dress and carpet designer, and
avid tiger hunter. (She hunted from atop a closed howdah, and once killed
four tigers with just six bullets.) Her niece was Asaf Khan’s daughter Arjumand
Banu, the woman for whom the Taj Mahal was built.
1630–1680 Dueling provides a favorite theme for French playwrights.
According to these writers, people (both men and women dueled in French
plays) dueled more often for love than honor, and trickery brought victory
more often than bravery.
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