Athletic competition played an important role in ancient Greek and Roman culture. From the earliest days, competitive athletics included the combat sports of boxing, wrestling and pankration. Though athletic combat sports continued during the Roman period along with the increase in agonistic festivals and retained their popularity and importance, the spectacle of gladiatorial combat itself also spread throughout the Roman Empire, including the Greek eastern sections. Combat sports presented the spectator with extreme acts of violence which were potentially even fatal. But that violence was controlled and purposive. It took place in ceremonial contexts – funerals, or religious festivals primarily – with athletes wearing special uniforms: nudity in the case of combat athletes and identifiable armaments for gladiators. The fights were not violent chaos or murderous free-for-alls, but regulated and controlled by rules and expectations, all monitored by referees and the watching people themselves. These games were able to give visible expression to the values and ideology at the heart of Greek and Roman societies: courage, skill and discipline, perseverance to victory against all adversity and at all costs, even one’s life, and the ostentatious demonstration of personal excellence. The public nature of the performances is critical: it must be seen to be legitimised. Victory in such combat was worthy of immortality.

Through most of human history, displays of violence, either between humans or animals, have been an integral component of sport. Violent sports have been global in reach and they have extended across every social rank, though they have been largely a male domain, with many societies placing restrictions on the extent to which women might participate in sports of any kind whether as participants and spectators. Yet the period since 1800 has witnessed an unmistakable redrawing of the place of violence in sport, with many societies becoming considerably more squeamish about sports that manipulate or showcase aggression between men or animals for entertainment. The West initiated legislation prohibiting animal cruelty in the nineteenth century, and these extended, albeit in a piecemeal fashion, to other parts of the globe in the twentieth century. There has also been a global move to restrict the degree of interpersonal violence in martial arts, boxing and wrestling, and although hand-to-hand combat sports remain popular across the globe, regulation has sharply reduced the risk of death or serious during competitive events. As a result, the period 1800-2000 has witnessed new controls on the degree of violence permitted in sport.

This chapter considers the importance of scribal skills, particularly letter writing, through a focus on the insha (epistolary) treatises of the Bahmani vizier, long-distance merchant and scholar, Mahmud Gavan. Against a background of court factionalism, Gavan advocated the cultivation of a genre of writing, insha or letter writing, which not only had strong practical uses for communication at court, but had the potential, if manipulated adroitly enough, to transform society, the recipient of the letter, and the individual writing the letter.

This chapter focuses on the martial skills of sword fighting, archery and wrestling. Courtiers were the military elite: a high position was frequently the reward of prowess in battle, and the ability to direct men and attract followers in daily life was directly related to one’s skill in battle. However, martial skills were not merely a prerequisite for worldly success. I examine the tale of Yusuf, who – by virtue of his skills as a wrestler – rose from lowly service in the kitchens of the sultan’s palace to become one of the most powerful courtiers in the Bahmani sultanate, and eventually the founder of the independent sultanate of Bijapur. In historical accounts like this, the refinement of martial skills and the perfection of one’s physical body came to be framed as a key ethical endeavour through the ideal of javanmardi, or ‘young manliness’.