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Born to a noble and ancient Etruscan lineage, Otho was one of the young nobles of Nero's court, said to be overly extravagant and reckless. His close friendship with Nero crumbled when his wife began an affair with the emperor and eventually divorced Otho, having Nero send Otho away to govern the distant province of Lusitania, where he would remain for ten years.<br/><br/>

Otho followed Galba in his revolt against Nero, but his own personal ambitions led him to betray and overthrow Emperor Galba, purchasing the services of the Praetorian Guard and killing Galba. Otho was declared emperor, but his reign would be even briefer than Galba's.<br/><br/>

Inheriting a revolution from Galba, Otho was forced to war against rival claimant to the throne Vitellius. After some of his army was defeated by the Vitellians, Otho decided to commit suicide rather than cause more deaths, even though he still had a substantial force willing to fight for him. He was only emperor for three months, and was the second emperor during the tumultuous Year of the Four Emperors.
Cornelis de Houtman (2 April 1565 – 1 September 1599) was a Dutch explorer who discovered a new sea route from Europe to Indonesia and managed to begin the Dutch spice trade. At the time, the Portuguese Empire held a monopoly on the spice trade, and the voyage was a symbolic victory for the Dutch, even though the voyage itself was a disaster.<br/><br/>

The voyage may be regarded as the start of the Dutch colonisation of Indonesia. Within five years, sixty-five more Dutch ships had sailed east to trade. Soon, the Dutch would fully take over the spice trade in and around the Indian Ocean.
Sati (also spelled suttee) is an obsolete Hindu funeral custom where a widow immolates herself on her husband's pyre, or commits suicide in another fashion shortly after her husband's death.<br/><br/>

Mention of the practice can be dated back to the 4th century BCE, while evidence of practice by widows of kings only appears beginning between the 5th and 9th centuries CE. The practice is considered to have originated within the warrior aristocracy on the Indian subcontinent, gradually gaining in popularity from the 10th century CE and spreading to other groups from the 12th through 18th centuries. The practice was particularly prevalent among some Hindu communities, observed in aristocratic Sikh families, and has been attested to outside South Asia in a number of localities in Southeast Asia, such as in Indonesia and Champa.
In 1597 the Dutch explorer Cornelis de Houtman arrived at Bali, and the Dutch East India Company was established in 1602.
Nicosia is the largest city on the island of Cyprus and its capital, located near the centre of the Mesaoria plain on the banks of the Pedieos River. Its well-preserved walls mark it as a star fort, built by the Venetians in 1567 due to the fears of an Ottoman invasion, which occurred in 1570.
Maharana Pratap Singh (9 May 1540 – 29 January 1597) was a Hindu Rajput ruler of Mewar, a region in north-western India in the present day state of Rajasthan. In popular Indian culture, Pratap is considered to exemplify qualities like bravery and chivalry to which Rajputs aspire, especially in context of his opposition to the Mughal emperor Akbar.<br/><br/>

The struggle between the Rajput confederacy led by Pratap Singh, and the Mughal Empire under Akbar, has often been characterised as a struggle between Hindus and the invading Muslims, much on the same lines as the struggle between Shivaji and Aurangzeb a little less than a century later.<br/><br/>

Maharana Pratap was a Hindu Rajput. He saw the Mughals as foreigners who had invaded India and therefore refused to surrender to them or accept their rule. His father, Udai Singh, had condemned the house of Man Singh for their marriage with unclean foreigners and Pratap Singh said that he would call Akbar only a 'Turk' and not an emperor.
Mughal painting is a particular style of Indian painting, generally confined to illustrations on the book and done in miniatures, which emerged, developed and took shape during the period of the Mughal Empire (16th-9th centuries).<br/><br/>

Mughal paintings were a unique blend of Indian, Persian and Islamic styles. Because the Mughal kings wanted visual records of their deeds as hunters and conquerors, their artists accompanied them on military expeditions or missions of state, or recorded their prowess as animal slayers, or depicted them in the great dynastic ceremonies of marriages.<br/><br/>

Akbar's reign (1556–1605) ushered a new era in Indian miniature painting. After he had consolidated his political power, he built a new capital at Fatehpur Sikri where he collected artists from India and Persia. He was the first morarch who established in India an atelier under the supervision of two Persian master artists, Mir Sayyed Ali and Abdus Samad. Earlier, both of them had served under the patronage of Humayun in Kabul and accompanied him to India when he regained his throne in 1555. More than a hundred painters were employed, most of whom were Hindus from Gujarat, Gwalior and Kashmir, who gave a birth to a new school of painting, popularly known as the Mughal School of miniature Paintings.