VIDEOS

[:hu]Sean Cleary is Chairman of Strategic Concepts (Pty) Ltd., Managing Director of the Centre for Advanced Governance, Founder and Executive Vice Chair of the Future World Foundation and Chairman of Atlantic Holdings (Pty) Ltd.

At its heyday, Ottoman territories in Europe extended roughly to the same borderline that divided the eastern and western commands of the Tetrarchy formalized at the end of the third century AD. The Ottoman – Hapsburg border, in retrospect, seems to have perpetuated the Roman administrative division as well as the borderline between the Catholic West and the Byzantine East.

The rapid Ottoman expansion from Thrace to the Danubian Europe is remembered as posing the greatest threat to Christendom. It gave rise to the widely shared image of the “terrible Turk” as the most feared enemy of European peoples and civilization and has helped enriched particularly the German language with specific references to measures adopted to warn or fend off the Turkish menace, such as Türkensteuer, Türkenglocken, and the overall Türkenfurscht.