About 1540 East Asian patent medicine salesmen start breaking bricks and
boards with their bare hands, to convince skeptical customers
that the peddlers’ opium-laden alcoholic beverages are as pow-
erful as claimed. Whereas legitimate breakers used normal
bricks and boards (a fist moving at 40 feet per second generates
about 675 foot-pounds of energy, far more than is necessary
to break a brick or board), illegitimate breakers often gave
challengers hardened bricks while saving weakened ones for
themselves.
About 1540 The Sikh guru Angad Dev establishes a wrestling pit, or
akhara,at Khadur Sahib. According to subsequent reports, the
guru’s goal was to instill character into street urchins.
1540 According to some Italian historians, Caminello Vitelli of Pis-
toia manufactures Europe’s first pistols. This seems unlikely,
though, as the Venetians built handgun ranges as early as 1506
and the Bohemians used the word pistala(pipes) to describe
one-handed guns as early as 1427. So it is probably better to
say that small handheld firearms became popular in southern
Europe during this period. Sixteenth-century Italian pistols
were about 2 feet long, and could be used as clubs following
discharge.
1540 After surviving a terrible leg wound, a pious Basque soldier
named Ignatius Loyola establishes an evangelistic Roman
Catholic monastic order known as the Society of Jesus, or Je-
suits. Loyola envisioned the Jesuits as members of a kind of
chivalric order, and his spiritual exercises, which taught solitary
meditation and fencing as forms of mental discipline, bear com-
parison to the Buddhist meditations used in China and Japan.
1542 The English Parliament bans crossbows, giving the reason that
“malicious and evil-minded people carried them ready bent and
charged with bolts, to the great annoyance and risk of passen-
gers on the highways”; they also ban “little short handguns,”
the reason being that too many yeomen were loading them
with “hail shot” and then slaughtering the king’s game birds
(Trench 1972, 116–118).
1543 The Portuguese introduce snaphaunce muskets into Japan.
Snaphaunce locks are a firing mechanism for handheld black-
powder firearms that drop the piece of flint onto a steel plate
near the touchhole. Hence their name, which means “pecking
hen” in Low Dutch. Snapping-lock muskets were mechanically
simpler and more reliable than wheel-locks, and Italian gun-
smiths continued making them until the 1810s. Always looking
for weapons to give ill-trained conscripts, Japanese warlords
quickly ordered these weapons into mass production, and
within fifty years, owned more high-quality firearms than all
the princes of Europe combined.
1545 A Tudor scholar and writer named Roger Ascham publishes
Toxophilus,the first English-language archery manual. An edu-
cated man, Ascham viewed archery as a way of promoting fit-
ness and building character rather than as a practical military
combative.
1547 The archbishop of Mainz conducts tests to discover why rifling806 Chronological History of the Martial Arts