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A combination of Louis XIV of France, the Elector of Bavaria, Max Emanuel, and Hungarian rebels, threatened to overthrow Leopold, and thus to end the Habsburg ability to counter-balance French power

These depots enabled the army to maintain cohesion and discipline, instead of having to disperse to obtain supplies

Marlborough had been more successful than his opponents in integrating cavalry and infantry; his cavalry were better trained for charging; and the artillery, under Colonel Holcroft Blood, manoeuvred rapidly on the battlefield, and was brought forward to help support the breakthrough in the centre

The victory ended the threat to Austria. Most of the Franco-Bavarian army was no longer effective after the battle and its subsequent retreat to the Rhine. The Allies followed up the battle with the conquest of southern Germany, as Bavaria was ‘taken out’ of the war, and took the major fortresses of Ulm, Ingolstadt and Landau before the close of the year. It was not until 1741 that French forces were again to campaign so far to the east – and later, and more seriously, in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when no British army marched to the Danube. In contrast, Marlborough’s advance into Germany had prepared the way for George II to campaign there in 1743, a campaign that culminated in another victory for the British and Austrians over the French at Dettingen, to the east of Frankfurt

Under Marlborough at Blenheim, the British army reached a peak of success that it was not to achieve again in Europe for another hundred years, until Wellington

Marlborough’s army was the most battle-hardened British army since those of the Civil Wars of the 1640s, but the armies of the Civil Wars had not been engaged in battles that were as extensive or sieges of positions that were as well fortified as those that faced Marlborough’s forces

The British in Gibraltar were now besieged on land by the French and the supporters of Philip V, but, as with the lengthy siege of Gibraltar by the Spaniards in 1780 during the American War of Independence, British fleet action proved crucial to the relief of the besieged garrison

As Marlborough was Master-General of the Ordnance as well as Captain-General of the Army, he was able to overcome any institutional constraints on co-operation between artillery and the rest of the army

Like Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the Thirty Years’ War seventy years earlier, Marlborough made his cavalry charge fast and act like a shock force, rather than as mounted infantry relying on pistol firepower

Marlborough went on to win other battles – notably Ramillies (1706), Oudenaarde (1708), and Malplaquet (1709) – but none had the dramatic impact of Blenheim, in part because that victory ended the danger that the anti-French alliance would collapse. But he also found that victory did not make it any easier to get the Allied forces to work together, and this, combined with differences in military and diplomatic strategy among the political leaders (the Dutch were especially cautious), made his task very difficult

Meanwhile, a few weeks earlier the seizure of Gibraltar had brought together Britain’s role as a Continental power with her interests as a maritime state. British troops were engaged in Iberia in support of ‘Charles III’, Leopold I’s second son and the Habsburg candidate for the crown of Spain, against Louis XIV’s second grandson, Philip V of Spain, who had been installed in 1700 under the terms of Charles II’s will. It proved far easier for Britain to intervene on the littoral, however, than to control the interior

the seizure of Gibraltar proved important as it registered the shift of naval hegemony from France to Britain. In the early 1690s Britain and France had contested the English Channel, but following the British victory at Barfleur in 1692, the navy had become far more effective in the Mediterranean. The dispatch of a large fleet under Russell to the Mediterranean in 1694 had been followed by its wintering at the then Allied port of Cadiz, a new achievement. The competing interests of Austria, France and Spain in the western Mediterranean ensured that this area was the cockpit of European diplomacy

n 1702, Sir George Rooke had concentrated on Spain’s Atlantic waters as a consequence of an attempt to intercept the Spanish treasure fleet from the New World. His attack on Cadiz had failed, but the Franco-Spanish fleet at Vigo was successfully attacked. British naval strength encouraged Portugal to switch sides in 1703; but, in an even more significant move, the same year Sir Cloudesley Shovell entered the Mediterranean and persuaded Victor Amadeus II of Savoy-Piedmont to abandon his alliance with Louis XIV

Rooke’s capture of Gibraltar on July 23rd, 1704, when the landing force was crucially supported by naval gunfire that silenced the enemy battery on the New Mole, led the French to mount a naval response to regain Gibraltar for Philip V and to demonstrate that France was still the leading naval power in the Mediterranean

Marlborough’s battles were fought on a more extended front than those of the 1690s, let alone the 1650s

These blows led the French to abandon the siege. Gibraltar’s inhabitants had been allowed to remain in the town if they took an oath of fidelity to ‘Charles III’, but ultimately the victory of Philip V, the Bourbon claimant, in the wider war removed this option, and instead the British acquired Gibraltar under the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. In an attempt to improve relations with Spain, in 1721 George I promised to approach Parliament for consent to return Gibraltar to Spain, but this was not deemed politically possible

Three years later a fleet based at Gibraltar discouraged a junction between Bourbon naval forces in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when the Mediterranean formed a frontline between the alliance systems of two clashing empires, Gibraltar was a key British resource

Maintaining a presence in Gibraltar thereafter ceased to be of vital strategic concern to the British and became a curiosity to many; but its major role for a quarter-millennium of national history should not be underplayed.

It failed, after a night-time error in navigation led to the loss of eight transport ships and nearly 900 men in the St Lawrence estuary, but the Peace of Utrecht of 1713 left Britain with recognition of its wartime gains: not only Gibraltar and Minorca, but also Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. This weakened the defences of New France and left the British clearly dominant in North American waters

In November Russia sent six warships from its Black Sea Fleet to the Mediterranean in response to the Israel-Gaza conflict. That month the U.S. also began making moves to increase the American military presence in the east Mediterranean.

In May a detachment from Russia’s Pacific Fleet entered the Mediterranean waters for the first time since the Cold War.

Here are some of the reasons the Mediterranean crossing has become increasingly dangerous.

The sharp rise in fatalities — 3,740 people died through this week — can be attributed in part to the changing tactics used by smugglers. They are loading thousands of people at a time and using less seaworthy boats, including inflatable rubber rafts that do not last the crossing.

So far this year, 327,800 people have crossed the Mediterranean, about half the number who crossed in the same period last year.

Most migrants are heading to Italy,

The Italian Navy and Coast Guard rescued more than 6,000 migrants in a single day early this month and on Monday pulled 2,200 more to safety in the course of 21 rescue operations.

The Libyan Coast Guard has denied any involvement in the incident, but Sea-Watch, a rescue organization that retrieved four bodies and rescued around 120 people in the incident,

"How can Italy possibly deal with all of these people by itself?" he asks adding: "You're a journalist, please tell the world, we need help."

but sent it back this month, prompting an angry rebuke from Greece, France and Germany.

further strained Turkey-EU ties

“imperial fantasies.”

Most of the people arriving in Greece cited conflict as a reason for their journey, with more than 56% of January's arrivals coming from war-torn Syria

Fueled by xenophobia and propaganda campaigns based on fear, refugee families, homes and places of worship are being targeted with hate crimes varying from physical attacks, vandalism, arson, and even more sinister incidents such as one where a mosque had blood thrown on its walls and a pig's head left at its door

Dr. Longo, who is also a professor of gerontology and director of the U.S.C. Longevity Institute in California, has long advocated longer and better living through eating Lite Italian, one of a global explosion of Road to Perpetual Wellville theories about how to stay young in a field that is itself still in its adolescence.

In addition to identifying genes that regulate aging, he has created a plant and nut-based diet with supplements and kale crackers that mimics fasting to, he argues, allow cells to shed harmful baggage and rejuvenate, without the down side of actually starving.

He has patented and sold his ProLon diet kits; published best-selling books (“The Longevity Diet”); and been called an influential “Fasting Evangelist” by Time magazine.

Last month, he published a new study based on clinical trials of hundreds of older people — including in the Calabria town from which his family hails — that he said suggests that periodic cycles of his own faux-fasting approach could reduce biological age and stave off illnesses associated with aging.

“It’s very similar to the original Mediterranean diet, not the present one,” she said, pointing at photographs on the wall of a bowl of ancient legumes similar to the chickpe

“Almost nobody in Italy eats the Mediterranean diet,”

He added that many Italian children, especially in the country’s south, are obese, bloated on what he calls the poisonous five Ps — pizza, pasta, protein, potatoes and pane (or bread).

in recent years, Silicon Valley billionaires who hope to be forever young have funded secretive labs. Wellness articles have conquered newspaper home pages and Fountains-of-Youth workout and diet ads featuring insanely fit middle-aged people teem on the social media feeds of not insanely fit middle-aged people.

he said Italy’s lack of investment in research was a disgrace.

even as concepts like longevity, intermittent fasting and biological age — you’re only as old as your cells feel! — have gained momentum, governments like Italy’s are fretting over a creakier future in which booming populations of old people drain resources from the dwindling young.

many scientists, nutritionists and longevity fanatics the world over continue to stare longingly toward Italy, seeking in its deep pockets of centenarians a secret ingredient to long life.

“Probably they kept breeding between cousins and relatives,” Dr. Longo offered, referring to the sometimes close relations in little Italian hill towns. “At some point, we suspect it sort of generated the super-longevity genome.”

The genetic drawbacks of incest, he hypothesized, slowly vanished because those mutations either killed their carriers before they could reproduce or because the town noticed a monstrous ailment — like early onset Alzheimer’s — in a particular family line and steered clear.

Dr. Longo wonders whether Italy’s centenarians had been protected from later disease by a starvation period and old-fashioned Mediterranean diet early in life, during rural Italy’s abject war-era poverty. Then a boost of proteins and fats and modern medicine after Italy’s postwar economic miracle protected them from frailty as they got older and kept them alive.

At age 16, he moved to Chicago to live with relatives and couldn’t help notice that his middle-aged aunts and uncles fed on the “Chicago diet” of sausages and sugary drinks suffered diabetes and cardiovascular disease that their relatives back in Calabria did not.

He eventually earned his Ph.D in biochemistry at U.C.L.A. and did his postdoctoral training in the neurobiology of aging at U.S.C. He overcame early skepticism about the field to publish in top journals and became a zealous evangelizer for the age-reversing effects of his diet. About 10 years ago, eager to be closer to his aging parents in Genoa, he took a second job at the IFOM oncology institute in Milan.

He found a fount of inspiration in the pescatarian-heavy diet around Genoa and all the legumes down in Calabria.

he also found the modern Italian diet — the cured meats, layers of lasagna and fried vegetables the world hungered for — horrendous and a source of disease.

His private foundation, also based in Milan, tailors diets for cancer patients, but also consults for Italian companies and schools, promoting a Mediterranean diet that is actually foreign to most Italians today.

“Italy’s got such incredible history and a wealth of information about aging,” he said. “But spends virtually nothing.”

He talked about how he and others had identified an important regulator of aging in yeast, and how he has investigated whether the same pathway was at work in all organisms.

Dr. Longo said he thinks of his mission as extending youth and health, not simply putting more years on the clock, a goal he said could lead to a “scary world,” in which only the rich could afford to live for centuries, potentially forcing caps on having children

A more likely short-term scenario, he said, was division between two populations. The first would live as we do now and reach about 80 or longer through medical advancements. But Italians would be saddled with long — and, given the drop in the birthrate, potentially lonely — years burdened by horrible diseases.

The other population would follow fasting diets and scientific breakthroughs and live to 100 and perhaps 110 in relative good health.

Some tents are spray-painted with messages like "help us, it's cold" and "borders are racist." Refugees stand in long lines waiting for food, usually bread with a piece of cheese.

It's gotten harder in recent weeks for refugees to get across the border so they can continue toward what they hope will be safe havens like Germany and Sweden.Macedonia is allowing only a few dozen Iraqis and Syrians to cross the border each day, which has created a backlog in Greece

A spokesperson for the U.N. high commissioner for refugees told CNN on Sunday that office was told by the Greek border police that Macedonia will now restrict acceptance of refugees from Iraq and Syria by province.

The geographical restrictions would mean that Syrians from the provinces of Damascus, Homs, Qamishli, Latakia and Tartus as well as Iraqis from the provinces of Baghdad, Diyala and Kirkuk and from Iraqi Kurdistan would not be allowed to continue on the route.

"There were strikes and people ran away. I happened to have my ID in my pocket, hers was in the house. We ran away, people were running away barefoot," he says, remembering the day they fled. If they had known what would happen, Ahmed says, they never would have come. They were sold a dream by those who made the journey before them.

At least 18 people trying to reach Greece drowned when their boat capsized off of Turkey's western coast, according to Turkey's semiofficial Anadolu news agency.

So far this year, more than 418 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Last year, more than 3,700 migrants died crossing the Mediterranean in attempts to reach Europe, making it the deadliest year on record for such deaths.

At that moment a large wave overturned the overloaded boat, and those who could not swim had little chance. Eighteen died, some before the rescuers took away the women, and some after.This was back in November 1997, but it is a scenario that has been repeated again and again in the intervening years.

Thousands of people have died on the journey to Mayotte from the other Comoros Islands - Anjouan, Moheli and Grande Comore - since Mayotte voted to remain part of France in 1975, and the other islands voted for independence. It's a carbon copy of the situation in the Mediterranean, where people make the crossing from North Africa or Turkey, in search of a better life - except that few in the West have paid the slightest attention to this crisis in the waters between Mozambique and Madagascar."We have the mournful reputation of having the largest marine cemetery," the Governor of Anjouan, Anissi Chamsidine, said in May. "More than 50,000 Comorians have perished amid a deafening silence from the international community and France…

The problem became acute in 1995, when the French government, under prime minister Edouard Balladur, put an end to visa-free travel.

islanders from the villages often do not have the papers needed for a visa application, so nearly everyone travelling to Mayotte from other Comoros islands goes illegally, by fishing boat, or kwassa-kwassa.The kwassa-kwassa are not intrinsically dangerous - they are a normal form of transport between the other Comoros islands and considered by the Comorians to be quite safe.But the migrants take round-about routes, nearly always travelling at night to dodge patrol boats - and all-too-often the smugglers overload the boats, just as they do in the Mediterranean.

The scale of the traffic is illustrated by the numbers picked up by the French authorities in Mayotte and sent home - about 20,000 in 2014 - and by the flood of applications made each year for residence permits - about 100,000, including renewals (of which only about 18,000 are approved).

Volcanic ash, more generally known as tephra, sometimes hides in ice. It’s a special find because it can be geochemically tied to a specific volcano. “The tephra comes from the magma itself,

Sulfur is also indicative of a past eruption. Sulfur dioxide, a gas commonly belched by erupting volcanoes, reacts with water in the atmosphere to create sulfate aerosols. These tiny particles can linger in the stratosphere for years, riding wind currents, but they, like tephra, eventually fall back to Earth.

The ice also carries a time stamp. Dr. McConnell and his colleagues look for variations in elements like sodium, which is found in sea spray that’s seasonally blown inland. By simply counting annual variations in these elements, it’s possible to trace the passage of time, Dr. McConnell said. “It’s like a tree-ring record.”

In layers of ice corresponding to the early months of 43 B.C., they spotted large upticks in sulfur and, crucially, bits of material that were probably tephra. The timing caught the scientists’ attention.

Researchers have previously hypothesized that an environmental trigger may have helped set in motion the crop failures, famines and social unrest that plagued the Mediterranean region at that time. But until now, “There hasn’t been the kind of data that these scholars brought forth to really get those theories into the mainstream,”

The match was spot on, Dr. Plunkett said. “There are some events that are tricky. With Okmok, there’s nothing else that looks like it.”

This eruption was one of the largest of the last few millenniums, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators concluded, and the sulfate aerosols it created remained in the stratosphere for several years. These tiny particles are particularly good at reflecting sunlight, which means they can temporarily alter Earth’s climate.

“They’ve created, for a short term, global cooling events,”

Using climate models to simulate the impact of an Okmok eruption, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators estimated that parts of the Mediterranean, roughly 6,000 miles away, would have cooled by as much as 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

Rain patterns changed as well — some regions would have been drenched by 400 percent more precipitation than normal, the modeling revealed.

That climate shock came at precisely the wrong time, Dr. Clark said. “This was a period of Mediterranean-wide political, social and economic upheaval.”

Historical records compiled by Roman writers and philosophers note food shortages and famines. In 43 B.C., Mark Antony, the Roman military leader, and his army had to subsist on wild fruit, roots, bark and “animals never tasted before,” the philosopher Plutarch wrote.

For a society already reeling from the assassination of Julius Caesar the year before, such trying conditions might have exacerbated social unrest, the researchers concluded. They might even have kick-started transfers of political power that led to the rise of the Roman Empire.

“It’s an incredible coincidence that it happened exactly in the waning years of the Roman Republic when things were falling apart,”

The links in the study are probable, but not definite. “They’re not being heavy handed and saying this is absolutely it,” Dr. Holmberg said.

Egyptian society, before the installation of the Aswan Low Dam in the early 20th century, was anchored by the annual summer flooding of the Nile River. These summer floods, sustained by monsoon rains in the highlands of Ethiopia, delivered irrigation and silt, both critical to Egypt’s agrarian society. “The whole rhythm of the year was built around responding to the flood,” Dr. Manning of Yale said.

But volcanic eruptions, even those on the other side of the world, could have disrupted that flooding, Dr. Manning and his colleagues recently showed. Using records from Cairo’s Nilometer — an octagonal marble column that was used for recording Nile flood height from 622 to 1902 A.D., the team found that flooding tended to be weaker, or entirely absent, during years when there was a large volcanic eruption somewhere in the world.

he culprit, the team reasoned in a paper published a few years ago, was cooling caused by sulfate aerosols. When Earth cools after a large eruption, its atmospheric circulation patterns change. That can shift the invisible meeting point of Northern and Southern Hemisphere trade winds — the Intertropical Convergence Zone — that affects where monsoon rains tend to fall. When less precipitation falls over Ethiopia, home to a major tributary of the Nile, there’s less water available for flooding that year.

Ptolemaic-era records revealed that this reduced flooding had socioeconomic and political consequences. Revolts increased in the years following “Nile failure,” Dr. Manning and his colleagues found. Priestly decrees — intended to establish the political legitimacy of Greek rulers — also became more commonplace.

“There are still large unsourced mystery eruptions up until the early 19th century.”

Right now, roughly a dozen volcanoes are erupting. In all likelihood, they’re nothing to worry about — it’s doubtful you’ve even heard of them. But every once in a while, there’s bound to be a really big eruption. How its effects ripple around the world awaits to be seen.

The Islamic Prophet Muhammad started preaching a monotheistic faith called Islam in his hometown of Mecca from 610 CE onwards.

Equality, egalitarianism, equal rights for women (who had been hitherto considered “property” by the Meccans), and the prospect of heaven attracted many towards Islam.

Despite putting forth strict persecution of the new religion and its preacher, Meccans failed to contain the Muslim community.

Medina offered Prophet Muhammad sovereignty over the city, making him the first ruler and king (r. 622-632 CE) of what was later to become the Islamic or Muslim Empire. The city-state of Medina soon came into conflict with Mecca, and the latter was conquered, after years of warfare, in 629/630 CE.

At the morrow of Prophet Muhammad’s death, the Islamic Empire slid to the brink of disintegration, as many advocated pre-Islamic home-rule system. This threat, however, was averted when Abu Bakr (r. 632-634 CE) proclaimed himself the Caliph of the Prophet and the first supreme ruler of the Islamic realm.

Abu Bakr now sought to expand his realm beyond the Arabian Peninsula. The Muslim Empire bordered two superpowers: the Byzantine Empire (330-1453 CE) and Sassanian Empire (224-651 CE) to the north-west and north-east respectively. These two colossal powers often clashed violently in prolonged wars, had exhausted their resources, and severely repressed Arabian tribes living in the Middle East in the course of pursuing ultimate power. For Abu Bakr, this was an opportune moment, although he may not have known that.

Never content with wasting an opportunity, the Caliph sent Khalid, who had now distinguished himself as a war hero, to raid Iraq (633 CE). The duo stuck to the western side of the Euphrates, where they enjoyed much success, employed eager locals in their ranks, and countered Sassanian advances towards the conquered territory.

Abu Bakr died in 634 CE, and his successor Umar ibn al-Khattab (r. 634-644 CE) took charge as the second caliph of the Islamic Empire and the "commander of the faithful". Caliph Umar reinforced the Iraqi front with fresh troops under the command of a reputable companion of the Prophet: Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas (l. 595-674 CE).

With this defeat, Sassanian control over Iraq was shattered, the Rashidun troops soon swept over the land and even took Ctesiphon – the Persian capital, ironically located far off from their power base in Khorasan, the eastern province – located in modern-day Iran.

Umar’s successor Uthman (r. 644-656 CE) continued the military expansion undertaken by his predecessors. Yazdegerd III, who had escaped to the eastern parts of his kingdom, was murdered by a local at Merv in 651 CE.

Abu Bakr sent four divisions under Shurahbil ibn Hasana (l. 583-639 CE), Yazid ibn Abi Sufyan (d. 640 CE), Amr ibn al-As (l. c. 573-664 CE), and Abu Ubaidah (l. 583-639 CE) to raid Syria and the Levant.

The Rashidun forces continued to advance northwards in the Levant and Syria. They took Damascus in 634 CE, either through an assault or treason, defeated the Palestinian imperial division in the Battle of Fahl (Pella; 635 CE).

Honed for their shipbuilding skills, the Syrians were employed to create a formidable Rashidun fleet to challenge Byzantine authority in the Mediterranean. After defeating the Byzantine fleet attempting to retake Alexandria (646 CE), the Muslims went on the offensive. Cyprus fell in 649 CE, followed by Rhodes in 654 CE, and in 655 CE, the Byzantine naval authority was crushed with a victory at the Battle of the Masts. Muslims held uncontested control over the Mediterranean and sent raiding parties as far as Crete and Sicily.

At its peak, the realm of the Rashidun Caliphate spread from parts of North Africa in the west to parts of modern-day Pakistan in the east; several islands of the Mediterranean had also come under their sway.

The Byzantines and Sassanians were superpowers of their time but years of warfare had weakened the two colossal titans

Moreover, Arabs were never expected to pose any threat to them, these disunited desert dwellers did not have the numbers or the will to face an empire. This, however, changed as the Arabian Peninsula was united under the banner of Islam by 633 CE. Freed from the infighting that had plagued them for centuries, the Arabs directed their potential towards their neighbors. They considered a just war as a holy struggle and if death was to embrace them, they would be immortalized as martyrs.

Such a strong resolve, however, was lacking in their foes. Both empires employed mercenaries, and these men did not feel similar passion for their client state as the Arabs did for the Caliphate. Moreover, a multiethnic army lacked the coherence imparted by a single faith and unified national sentiment, but perhaps the most destructive penalty that these empires faced was because of how they treated their people in their provinces.

Some European leaders are warning of a fresh migration crisis when sea waters warm again and more people choose to put their lives in the hands of smugglers.

Pope Francis is demanding that "every possible measure" be taken to protect young refugees as he marks the church's World Day of Migrants a day after the latest Mediterranean migrant shipwreck.

Italy's coast guard says only four people survived the sinking of a migrant ship off Libya's coast on Saturday. An estimated 100 people were aboard and only eight bodies have been recovered.

unusually high-resolution analysis of pollen grains taken from sediment beneath the Sea of Galilee and the western shore of the Dead Sea, backed up by a robust chronology of radiocarbon dating, have pinpointed the period of crisis to the years 1250 to 1100 B.C.

this pollen count was done at intervals of 40 years — the highest resolution yet in this region,

the uniqueness of the study also lay in the combination of precise science and archaeological and historical analysis, offering the fullest picture yet of the collapse of civilization in this area at the end of the Bronze Age. “Egypt is gone. Forever,” said Professor Finkelstein. “It never got back to that level of prosperity again.”

the team extracted about 60 feet of cores of gray muddy sediment from the center of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, passing through 145 feet of water and drilling 65 feet into the lake bed, covering the last 9,000 years. At Wadi Zeelim in the southern Judean Desert, on the western margins of the Dead Sea, the team manually extracted eight cores of sediment, each about 20 inches long.

Pollen grains are one of the most durable organic materials in nature, she said, best preserved in lakes and deserts and lasting thousands of years. Each plant produces its own distinct pollen form, like a fingerprint. Extracting and analyzing the pollen grains from each stratum allows researchers to identify the vegetation that grew in the area and to reconstruct climate changes.

The results showed a sharp decrease in the Late Bronze Age of Mediterranean trees like oaks, pines and carobs, and in the local cultivation of olive trees, which the experts interpret as the consequence of repeated periods of drought.

The droughts were likely exacerbated by cold spells, the study said, causing famine and the movement of marauders from north to south. After the devastation came a wet period of recovery and resettlement, according to the experts — a new order that gave rise to the kingdoms of biblical times.

However, an EU plan to disperse 40,000 migrants from Italy and Greece to other countries met with resistance this week. Britain said it would not participate and some eastern countries have called for a voluntary scheme.

From the beginning, Byzantium manifested highly creative and original impulses to re-fashion rich, pre-existing traditions. Its inner Greek fire came from a unique combination of traits. When Constantine created his new capital, he brought together Roman administrative skills, law and military traditions; the Hellenic wisdom long sustained by ancient Greek education; and the dynamic new Christian belief (which later became the state's driving force).

The city quickly generated a highly sophisticated work force. Its artisans produced the Mediterranean world's most elegant silks, carved ivories and gold enamels. Its engineers constructed the immense walls that kept all enemies out of Constantinople until 1204. The recent excavations of the harbor of Theodosius (today Yenikapi) have yielded more than 30 boats and their cargoes and shown how the capital attracted traders and craftsmen from across the Mediterranean. Venice, Genoa and Pisa established quarters within the city, while Syrian and Russian merchants stayed in particular residences when they came to trade. In the 1090s, as the western forces of the First Crusade arrived at Constantinople, they were overcome with awe at the wealth and sophistication of the eastern capital, the like of which they had not even imagined. The city was larger than any in Western Europe, with a population of about 500,000— a level not attained by Paris until the 17th century.

The Byzantines knew that negotiating peace terms was infinitely preferable to risking the loss of highly trained and hard-to-replace fighting forces. By developing a trained service of diplomats—a typical embassy would comprise a general, a bishop and a high-ranking eunuch, accompanied by secretaries with records of past negotiations—the empire nurtured the skills we associate with a modern state.

historians established, half a century ago, how difficult Byzantium's position was between aggressive states east and west.

Both Peter Heather's "Empires and Barbarians " (2009), although it only treats the first millennium A.D., and John Darwin's "After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000 " (2007) consider Byzantium in such a comparative perspective.

it always had to balance the two very distant fronts with the immense lines of communication and logistical support extending from the Caucasus to the Adriatic.

The last phase of Byzantine power, from 1261 to 1453, was marked by military failure and shrinking control but also by a great cultural explosion.

Mr. Harris provides a sympathetic reading of the civil wars and conflicts engendered by the empire's fundamental problem in this era: how to balance Byzantine traditions with the need for military aid from the West in order to confront the Ottoman Turks.

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The empire checked the first great wave of Muslim expansion in the 630s, and by 740 a more secure border with the caliphate in Damascus was established at the Taurus mountains in southeastern Turkey.

Around Europe, other tankers with Iranian oil are close behind the Monte Toledo. In February, 29 vessels loaded crude from the Middle Eastern nation, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Of them, three are heading toward Europe -- the Eurohope tanker is sailing to Constanta, an oil port in Romania, and the Atlantas is on its way to France. Another one, the Distya Akula, is anchored at the mouth of the Suez Canal, and is likely to head into a Mediterranean port.

Iran will want to win back customers in Europe, where Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and other rival suppliers stepped in after the embargo was imposed. Tehran also faces a rival unknown four years ago: the U.S. has started exporting crude and companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. are shipping American Crude into refineries in the Mediterranean.

If all goes as Tehran has planned, the Middle Eastern country will boost its production back to the 3.6 million barrels a day it pumped in 2011. After the European embargo was imposed and the U.S. tightened other sanctions, Iranian oil production dropped to about 2.8 million barrels a day.

The number reaching Greece was 210,265, and for Italy it was 8,129, according to the UNHCR.

Germany expects at least 800,000 asylum seekers this year - some estimates put it as high as 1.5 million. That is at least four times the number who arrived last year.

Her Christian Social Union (CSU) ally Horst Seehofer is pushing for transit zones to be set up to process arrivals near the country's borders. Mrs Merkel's CDU party backs the idea, however Social Democrat leader Sigmar Gabriel is opposed to the zones amid concerns that they might resemble detention camps.

six rescue operations

traveling in a fishing boat and five rubber dinghies

Authorities also brought ashore a corpse in a metal coffin

shot dead

Sicilian court is investigating the death

waves of migrants arriving in overcrowded boats from North Africa

Italy

trying to convince the EU to help

EU this year agreed to triple funding for sea rescues off the coasts of Italy and Greece

deeply divided

manage the migrants once they come ashore

distribute 40,000 Syrian and Eritrean asylum seekers

"hot spots"

Commission pla

identify migrants and refugees

calls for those

thousands of new boat arrivals each week

France is increasingly turning back migrants

Rome and Milan

Italy's train stations

100 migrants have been sleeping rough along the Italy-France border for almost two weeks