TODAY IN HISTORY
March 6, 961: The Siege of Chandax ends with a Byzantine victory and the imperial recovery of the island of Crete.
March 6, 1204: The Siege of Château Gaillard, which had begun the previous August, ends with a French victory that sets up the eventual conquest of Normandy. Château Gaillard was one of French King Philip II’s most important victories in his 1202-1204 campaign to take Normandy from the Angevin Empire, which had been weakened by civil war after the death of King Richard the Lionheart in 1199 and the accession of the less capable King John. Philip defeated an English relief army and ignored John’s diversionary invasion of Brittany, and his army was eventually able to breach the castle and force its garrison to surrender. The fall of Château Gaillard opened the rest of Normandy to French invasion, and the April 1 death of John’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, further weakened the Angevin Empire. Normandy was fully under French control by August.
INTERNATIONAL
A new study published in the journal Nature finds that studies of sea level rise have drastically underestimated the extent to which it has already taken place. It turns out that most of those studies have relied not on actual sea level measurements but on “geoid models” that are surprisingly inaccurate. This doesn’t mean that that these studies are wrong in terms of predicting the extent of future sea level rise, but that they have been underplaying how much land and how many people will be effected by it. As the abstract says, “compared with geoid-based assumptions of coastal sea level, the measured values suggest that with a hypothetical 1 m of relative sea-level rise, 31–37% more land and 48–68% more people (increasing estimates to 77–132 million) would fall below sea level.”
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
Reuters reported on Friday that the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) approached the UK’s MI6 agency last month about taking on “a larger role in protecting Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa after recent assassination plots.” Turkish officials subsequently denied the report. The main concern here seems to be Islamic State, which declared “a new phase of operations” in Syria last month and has targeted a number of rhetorical salvos at Sharaa. Syrian authorities have claimed that IS made five unsuccessful attempts to kill Sharaa last year.
