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