Piri Reis


Ahmed Muhiddin Piri, better known as Piri Reis, was an Ottoman admiral, navigator, geographer and cartographer.
He is primarily known today for his maps and charts collected in his Kitab-ı Bahriye, a book that contains detailed information on navigation, as well as very accurate charts 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 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 in existence anywhere. Piri Reis' 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 still survives. According to his imprinting text, he had drawn his maps using about 20 foreign charts and mappae mundi including one by Christopher Columbus. He was executed in 1553 in Cairo, having been found guilty of raising the siege of Hormuz Island and abandoning the fleet, even though his reason was the lack of maintenance of his ships.

Biography

For many years, little was known about the identity of Piri Reis. The name Piri Reis means Captain Piri.
Today, based on the Ottoman archives, it is known that his full name was "Hacı Ahmed Muhiddin Piri" and that he was born either in Gelibolu on the European part of the Ottoman Empire, or in Karaman in central Anatolia, then the capital of the Beylik of Karaman. The exact date of his birth is unknown. His father's name was Hacı Mehmed Piri. The honorary and informal Islamic title Hadji in Piri's and his father's names indicate that they both had completed the Hajj by going to Mecca during the dedicated annual period.
Piri began engaging in government-supported privateering 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 in 1499 and the Second Battle of Lepanto in 1500. When his uncle Kemal Reis died in 1511, 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. 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 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. 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 of Basra, Kubad Pasha, in another campaign against the Portuguese in the northern Persian Gulf, Piri Reis was beheaded in 1553.
Several warships and submarines of the Turkish Navy have been named after Piri Reis.

''Kitab-ı Bahriye''

Piri Reis is the author of the Kitāb-ı Baḥrīye, 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.

Contents

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. There are thirty legends around the world map, twenty-nine in Turkish and one in Arabic; the latter gives the date as the month Muharrem of AH 919 AH but most studies have identified the more probable date of completion as 1521.
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, this section has a total of 132 portolan charts, while the second book 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 and Dutch 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.
Copies of the first edition :
Copies of the second edition :
Piri Reis is mentioned in the video game ', and appears in its sequel '. In Brotherhood, a group of Italian Assassins sent from Rome to Constantinople by Ezio Auditore da Firenze infiltrates Piri Reis' 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 joined the Ottoman Assassin Brotherhood in 1506 to serve as a scholar and technician, and even eventually progressed to the rank of Master Assassin. Later, he acts as a pyrotechnician, scholar and cartographer.
He is also mentioned in the game House of Da Vinci II, as the person who offered a gift, a beautiful construction containing many puzzles, to Cesare Borgia. In the game, in the letter accompanying the gift, Piri Reis mentions that he discovered the “clock” during his travels and that it was “devised and constructed by the great thinker Ismail al-Jazari more than two hundred years ago to show the benefit of cultural diversity”.