The ‘hordes’ linger in Europe’s memory: Turkey’s EU membership
By Nicolas Cheviron

AFP
2 Oct 04

ISTANBUL: When Europe first saw the Turks nearly 1,000 years ago,
Byzantine historians believed they had met “the hordes of the
Apocalypse”; ten centuries later, Europe’s collective memory is still
marked by prejudice against this nation now knocking at the EU’s door.

To this earliest recollection of the Turks’ parentage with the
terrible Huns who ravaged Europe half a millennium earlier,
traditional European history has added the more recent memory of the
threat they posed to Christian Europe after their conversion to Islam
in the 10th century.

The arrival of the “scourge of Christianity” on Mediterranean shores
in the 11th century led to a series of wars between Christian princes
and the Seljuk Dynasty, from whose ashes the Ottomans emerged in the
early 1300s.

Modern European schoolbooks still retain bitter memories of these
conflicts, from the 1071 defeat of the Byzantines at Manzikert –
modern Malazgirt, in eastern Turkey – to the fall of Constantinople –
now Istanbul – in 1453 and the failed sieges of Vienna in 1529 and
1683. But Ottoman domination of the Balkans and the Mediterranean did
not last forever and from the late 17th century on, Europe stopped
seeing the empire as a threat and began eying it as possible prey,
particularly from the 19th century on, when it was famously called
“The Sick Man of Europe.”

As the once mighty and opulent Ottoman Empire declined and the Age of
Enlightenment spread across Europe, the image of the Turk merged with
that of Islam as a civilization impossible to modernize and despotic
by nature.

Thus, Europe tended to sneer at all attempts by the Turks to
westernize – from Selim III, strangled in the seraglio in 1808 for his
efforts, to the Young Turks movement of 1908 and Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk’s proclamation of the modern Turkish Republic in 1923 – as
cosmetic measures failing to attack the root problems of a backward
culture.

Many 20th century researchers, however, have explained that prejudices
against the Turks were not as widespread as contemporary chroniclers
would have us believe. As early as 1536, Francis I, King of France,
did not hesitate to form an alliance with the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman
the Magnificent against what he saw as a far greater enemy: the Holy
Roman Empire of the House of Habsburg.

“With the exception of some localized areas of contact… Westerners
at the start of the Modern Age never really feared the Muslim
(Turkish) threat,” wrote French historian Jean Delumeau in his book,
Fear in The West.

Until the beginning of the 16th century, Delumeau wrote, large numbers
of Christians, mostly peasants, fled to Ottoman provinces to escape
Europe’s harsh feudal system.

“Of the 48 Grand Viziers (the Ottoman equivalent of prime minister)
who ruled from 1453 to 1623,” he wrote, “at least 33 were renegades” –
Christians who converted to Islam to serve the Sultan.

Thierry Hentsch, author of the book “The Imaginary Orient”, claims
that the negative image of the Turk was simply a sort of instrument
the Europeans devised to better define their own selves.

“The West showed interest (in the Turks and their culture) without
realizing that they were really interested in themselves,” he
wrote. “They represented it to better identify themselves, they
denigrated it to reassure – or to frighten – themselves, and they
dreamed of it to escape.”

One historic problem remains, however, that casts a pall on latter-day
relations: the massacre by Ottoman troops in 1915 of hundreds of
thousands of Armenians, which much of Europe considers genocide, a
term the Turkish authorities reject. -AFP