Piri Reis

Ahmed Muhiddin Piri (c. 1465 – 1553 ), better known as Piri Reis (Pîrî Reis or Hacı Ahmet Muhittin Pîrî Bey), was an Ottoman navigator, geographer and cartographer. He is primarily known today for his maps and charts collected in his Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation), a book that contains detailed information on early navigational techniques as well as relatively accurate charts for their time, describing the important ports and cities of the Mediterranean Sea.

He gained fame as a cartographer when a small part of his first world map, prepared in 1513, was discovered in 1929 at the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. His world map is the oldest known Turkish atlas showing the New World, and one of the oldest maps of America still existing anywhere (the oldest known surviving map of America is the map drawn by Juan de la Cosa in 1500). Piri Reis's map is centered on the Sahara at the latitude of the Tropic of Cancer.

In 1528, Piri Reis drew a second world map, of which a small fragment (showing Greenland and North America from Labrador and Newfoundland in the north to Florida, Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica and parts of Central America in the south) still survives. According to his imprinting text, he had drawn his maps using about 20 foreign charts and mappae mundi (Arab, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Indian and Greek) including one by Christopher Columbus. He was executed in 1553 in Cairo, having been found guilty of lifting the siege of Hormuz Island and abandoning the fleet, even though his reason for doing so was the lack of maintenance of his ships.

Biography
Very little background information is known about Piri Reis. Unconfirmed tradition holds that he was born around 1470 in Gallipoli on the Dardanelles which was at the time an important Ottoman naval base. His father was Hacı Mehmed, originally from the Anatolian province of Karaman. His ancestry is disputed; some sources claim that he was born into a Turkish family, while other sources indicate that he was born into a Greek family which converted from Christianity to Islam. His full name was Hacı Ahmed Muhiddin Piri. Reis was a military rank equivalent to captain, so the name Piri Reis translates as Captain Piri. The honorary and informal Islamic title Hadji (Turkish: Hacı) in Piri's and his father's names indicate that they both had completed the Hajj (Islamic pilgrimage) by going to Mecca during the dedicated annual period.

Piri began engaging in government-supported privateering (a common practice in the Mediterranean Sea among both the Muslim and Christian states of the 15th and 16th centuries) when he was young, following his uncle Kemal Reis, a well-known corsair and seafarer of the time, who later became a famous admiral of the Ottoman Navy. During this period, together with his uncle, he took part in many naval wars of the Ottoman Empire against Spain, the Republic of Genoa and the Republic of Venice, including the First Battle of Lepanto (Battle of Zonchio) in 1499 and the Second Battle of Lepanto (Battle of Modon) in 1500. When his uncle Kemal Reis died in 1511 (his ship was wrecked by a storm in the Mediterranean Sea, while he was heading to Egypt), Piri returned to Gelibolu, where he started working on his studies about navigation.

By 1516, he was again at sea as a ship captain in the Ottoman fleet. He took part in the 1516–17 Ottoman conquest of Egypt. In 1522 he participated in the Siege of Rhodes against the Knights of St. John, which ended with the island's surrender to the Ottomans on 25 December 1522 and the permanent departure of the Knights from Rhodes on 1 January 1523 (the Knights relocated briefly to Sicily and later permanently to Malta). In 1524 he captained the ship that took the Ottoman Grand Vizier Pargalı İbrahim Pasha to Egypt.

In 1547, Piri had risen to the rank of Reis (admiral) as the Commander of the Ottoman Fleet in the Indian Ocean and Admiral of the Fleet in Egypt, headquartered in Suez. On 26 February 1548 he recaptured Aden from the Portuguese, followed in 1552 by the sack of Muscat, which Portugal had occupied since 1507, and the strategically important island of Kish. Turning further east, Piri Reis attempted to capture the island of Hormuz in the Strait of Hormuz, at the entrance of the Persian Gulf, unsuccessfully, the Ottomans managed to capture the city but not the fortress. He then sacked the nearby island of Qeshm and sailed with his booty to Basra. When the Portuguese turned their attention to the Persian Gulf, Piri Reis occupied the Qatar peninsula to deprive the Portuguese of suitable bases on the Arabian coast.

He then returned to Egypt, an old man approaching the age of 90. When he refused to support the Ottoman Vali (Governor) of Basra, Kubad Pasha, in another campaign against the Portuguese in the northern Persian Gulf, Piri Reis was beheaded in 1553.

Piri Reis map of 1513


The Piri Reis map of 1513 is a world map that Piri Reis compiled from a range of contemporary and classical sources. Approximately one third of the map survives, housed in the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. When his uncle died in 1511, Piri Reis temporarily retired to Gallipoli and began composing his first world map. The finished manuscript was dated to the month of Muharram in the Islamic year 919 AH, equivalent to 1513 AD. Piri Reis returned to the navy and played a role in the 1517 conquest of Egypt. After the Ottoman victory, Piri Reis presented the 1513 world map to Ottoman Sultan Selim I ((r. 1512 – 1520)). It is unknown how Selim used the map, if at all, as it would vanish from history until its rediscovery centuries later. When rediscovered in 1929, the remaining fragment garnered international attention as it includes a partial copy of an otherwise lost map by Christopher Columbus.



The map is a portolan chart, as shown by the compass roses from which lines of bearing radiate. Designed for navigation via dead reckoning, portolan charts use a windrose network rather than a longitude and latitude grid. It contains extensive notes primarily in Ottoman Turkish. The colophon in Arabic is written in a different handwriting, likely that of Piri Reis himself. The depiction of South America is detailed and accurate for its time. Scholars attribute the peculiar arrangement of the Caribbean to a now-lost map from Columbus that depicted Cuba as part of the Asian mainland and Hispaniola according to Marco Polo's description of Japan. The southern coast of the Atlantic Ocean is widely accepted to be a version of Terra Australis.

The map is visually distinct from European portolan charts, populated by Islamic miniatures. The map was unusual in the Islamic cartographic tradition for incorporating many non-Muslim sources. Historian Karen Pinto has described the combination of legendary creatures from the edge of the known world with positive portrayals as challenging the medieval Islamic idea of an "inhabited quarter" of the world surrounded by an impassable Encircling Ocean. Piri Reis adapted the elements of iconography from the traditional maps&mdash;which illustrated well-known routes, cities, and peoples&mdash;to the portolan portrayals of newly discovered coasts.

There are conflicting interpretations of the map. Scholarly debate exists over the specific sources used in the map's creation and the number of source maps. Many areas on the map have not been conclusively identified with real or mythical places. Some authors have noted visual similarities to parts of the Americas not officially discovered by 1513, but there is no textual or historical evidence that the map represents land south of present-day Cananéia. A disproven 20th-century hypothesis identified the southern landmass with an ice-free Antarctic coast.

Kitab-ı Bahriye


Piri Reis is the author of the Kitab-ı Bahriye, or "Book of the Sea", one of the most famous cartographical works of the period. The book gives seafarers information on the Mediterranean coast, islands, crossings, straits, and gulfs; where to take refuge in the event of a storm, how to approach the ports, and precise routes to the ports. The work was first published in 1521, and it was revised in 1524–1525 with additional information and better-crafted charts in order to be presented as a gift to Sultan Suleiman I. The revised edition had a total of 434 pages containing 290 maps.



Apart from the maps, the book also contained detailed information on the major ports, bays, gulfs, capes, peninsulas, islands, straits and ideal shelters of the Mediterranean Sea, as well as techniques of navigation and navigation-related information on astronomy, together with information about the local people of each country and city and the curious aspects of their culture.

The Kitab-ı Bahriye has two main sections, with the first section dedicated to information about the types of storms; techniques of using a compass; portolan charts with detailed information on ports and coastlines; methods of finding direction using the stars; and characteristics of the major oceans and the lands around them. Special emphasis is given to the discoveries in the New World by Christopher Columbus and those of Vasco da Gama and the other Portuguese seamen on their way to India and the rest of Asia.

The second section is entirely composed of portolan charts and cruise guides. Each topic contains the map of an island or coastline. In the first book (1521), this section has a total of 132 portolan charts, while the second book (1525) has a total of 210 portolan charts. The second section starts with the description of the Dardanelles Strait and continues with the islands and coastlines of the Aegean Sea, Ionian Sea, Adriatic Sea, Tyrrhenian Sea, Ligurian Sea, the French Riviera, the Balearic Islands, the coasts of Spain, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Canary Islands, the coasts of North Africa, Egypt and the River Nile, the Levant and the coastline of Anatolia. This section also includes descriptions and drawings of the famous monuments and buildings in every city, as well as biographic information about Piri Reis who also explains the reasons why he preferred to collect these charts in a book instead of drawing a single map, which would not be able to contain so much information and detail.

A century after Piri's death and during the second half of the 17th century, a third version of his book was produced, which left the text of the second version unaffected while enriching the cartographical part of the manuscript. It included additional new large-scale maps, mostly copies of the Italian (from Battista Agnese and Jacopo Gastaldi) and Dutch (Abraham Ortelius) works of the previous century. These maps were much more accurate and depict the Black Sea, which was not included in the original.

Manuscripts
Copies of the Kitab-ı Bahriye are found in various libraries in Istanbul and in some of the major libraries in Europe, besides one copy known to be held privately in the USA (Walters Art Museum).

Copies of the first edition (1521):
 * Istanbul, Topkapı Palace, ms Bagdad 337
 * Istanbul, Nuruosmaniye Library, ms 2990
 * Istanbul, Süleymaniye Library, ms Aya Sofya 2605
 * Bologna University Library, ms. Marsili 3609.
 * Bologna University Library, ms. Marsili 3612.
 * Vienna, Austrian National Library, Cod. H.O. 192.
 * Dresden, Staatbibliothek, ms. Eb 389.
 * Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, suppl.turc 220.
 * London, British Museum, ms. Oriental 4131.
 * Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. D'Orville 543
 * Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, W.658.

Copies of the second edition (1525):
 * Istanbul, Topkapı Palace, ms. Hazine 642.
 * Istanbul, Köprülü Library, ms. 171.
 * Istanbul, Süleymaniye Library, ms Aya Sofya 3161.
 * Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, suppl. Turc 956.

1528 world map


Piri Reis compiled a second world map in 1528. Only a fragment of the map&mdash;the northwest corner&mdash;remains. The parchment fragment is approximately 70 centimeters square. As with the 1513 map, the 1528 map has calligraphic inscriptions in Ottoman-Turkish written in the Arabic alphabet. The colophon is in Arabic, likely handwritten by Piri Reis himself. According to the colophon, Piri Reis compiled the map in 1528 in Gallipoli. However, he may not have completed it until 1529.

The 1528 map was a portolan chart like his earlier works. It uses a windrose network radiating out from compass roses. The map includes one line of latitude, the Tropic of Cancer; it is about ten degrees south of the correct position for Cuba and the Yucatan. The map uses standard portolan colors and symbols. Dots indicate shallow waters and shoals. Crosses indicate rocks and reefs. The miniatures painted on the map depict two caravels and a carrack. The scale bars indicate 50 miles between the sections of the scales.

Based on the design of recently discovered geographical features like Greenland, Newfoundland, and Florida, the map likely relied on Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian maps from the 1520s. Notes on the map cite recent Portuguese voyages to Labrador and Newfoundland. Hispaniola and Cuba are much more accurate compared to the 1513 world map. Cuba, labeled "Isla di Vana", is now correctly positioned as an island in the Caribbean. In contrast to the 1513 map, Piri Reis leaves areas that have not been explored blank. Only the explored southern coasts of the Florida peninsula are on the map. The geography of Florida is left ambiguous as potentially an island or peninsula. The Spanish Empire's master map, the Padrón Real, included this type of ambiguous Florida until 1520, and it influenced Italian cartography like the Freducci map.

Legacy


Piri Reis is mentioned in the 2010 video game Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, and appears as a character in its 2011 sequel Assassin's Creed: Revelations. In Brotherhood, a group of Italian Assassins sent from Rome to Constantinople by Ezio Auditore da Firenze infiltrates Piri Reis's shop to steal some of his maps detailing the New World, in order to match the Templars' expansion into the new lands. By Revelations, despite his earlier conflict with the Assassins, Piri joins the Ottoman Assassin Brotherhood in 1506 to serve as a scholar and technician, and even eventually progresses to the rank of Master Assassin.

In the 2021 Turkish TV series Barbaros: Sword of the Mediterranean, he is portrayed by actor Emir Benderlioğlu.

Several warships and submarines of the Turkish Navy have been named after Piri Reis.