June 1 in History

Jalal Talabani and fellow Kurdish leaders founded the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan to challenge both Iraqi state repression and rival Kurdish factions. The PUK organized armed resistance in the mountains while building political infrastructure that would eventually help Talabani become Iraq's first Kurdish president after the 2003 invasion.

Genghis Khan didn't destroy Zhongdu — he waited. For two years, his forces strangled the city's supply lines until Emperor Xuanzong fled south, abandoning his own capital. The people left inside starved. When the Mongols finally entered in 1215, the city was already broken. Contemporary accounts describe bones piled so high outside the walls they looked like hills. And from that ruins, Kublai Khan would later build Khanbaliq — the city that became Beijing. The conqueror didn't erase the city. He handed it a future.

The Livonian Order had conquered the Baltic for over a century — crusading knights, fortified castles, total dominance. Then Turaida happened. In 1298, an alliance of Riga's merchants and Lithuanian warriors routed them on their own turf, killing the Order's Master, Bruno von Harpe, in the fighting. Bruno didn't survive to explain what went wrong. And the Order never fully recovered its grip on Riga. The city's traders had decided swords beat prayers. They were right.

Forty thousand nobles crammed into Buda for a party with a price tag nobody advertised. Sigismund of Hungary needed cash — badly — so he pledged thirteen Spiš towns to Poland as collateral for a loan of 37,000 Czech groschen. Władysław II Jagiełło got the feast, the tournament, the pageantry. And he got real estate. Those thirteen towns stayed under Polish control for 360 years. The grandest royal gathering in medieval Buda wasn't a celebration. It was a mortgage signing dressed in silk.

Charles V sent 30,000 soldiers and 400 ships to North Africa — not just to fight Ottomans, but to free roughly 20,000 Christian slaves held in Tunis. Hayreddin Barbarossa, the Ottoman admiral who'd taken the city just a year earlier, fled before the assault even peaked. The Spanish-led coalition stormed in, liberated the slaves, and installed a friendly ruler on the Tunisian throne. But here's the twist: the "liberated" city was sacked by Charles's own troops anyway. The rescuers became the looters.

Agustin Sumuroy didn't want an empire. He wanted to stay home. Spanish authorities were forcibly relocating Filipino laborers from Northern Samar to distant shipyards in Cavite — thousands of miles away, tearing men from their families, their rice fields, their lives. Sumuroy said no. His revolt spread fast, igniting uprisings across Visayas and Mindanao. But Spain crushed it within two years, and Sumuroy was killed in 1650. The real shock? This wasn't rebellion against colonial rule. It was a labor dispute that became a war.

Charles II signed away England's foreign policy in secret — and his own Parliament never knew. The Treaty of Dover, 1670, wasn't just a military alliance; Louis XIV was paying Charles £166,000 a year to keep England fighting the Dutch and, quietly, to convert England back to Catholicism. Charles pocketed the money. He never seriously pursued the conversion clause. But the war came anyway, draining English blood and treasure for Dutch trade routes Charles didn't control. He'd sold England's independence for cash. And spent it before anyone found out.

Seven trips into the surf. Fourteen men dragged to shore. Wolraad Woltemade, a retired soldier turned dairy farmer, had already done the impossible when his horse Vonk carried him back in for an eighth run. Desperate survivors grabbed on — too many, too hard. Vonk couldn't fight the current anymore. Both went under. The Dutch East India Company later named a medal after him. But here's the thing: he didn't have to go back after the seventh.

Benedict Arnold walked into that court-martial as a war hero. Saratoga. Valcour Island. A man who'd taken a musket ball through the leg charging British lines. But Philadelphia's civilian officials wanted him punished for using military wagons to haul personal cargo. Small stuff. Petty stuff. Washington privately thought so too. Arnold was acquitted of most charges but received a formal reprimand. That reprimand broke something in him. Within months, he was secretly writing to the British. The court-martial didn't create a traitor — it finished one.