Piri Reis

Naval career and cartography

Like many Ottoman corsairs of the period, Piri Reis and his uncle were recruited into the Ottoman Navy by Bayezid II. For Kemal Reis and his contemporaries, the boundaries between outright piracy, state-sponsored corsairing, and formal naval service were fluid.

After Kemal Reis was imprisoned for piracy in 1495, the sultan granted him an official position in the navy instead of further punishment. As recorded in the Kitab-ı Bahriye, Kemal Reis and Piri Reis advised the sultan to take the strategically valuable island of Rhodes. Just 20 km (12 mi) off the coast of Anatolia, Rhodes was close enough to threaten the sea lanes between the empire's European capital and its Mediterranean ports. They also advocated seizing the Venetian coastal fortresses on the Peloponnese.

Around the turn of the century, Piri Reis fought in the Ottoman–Venetian wars as a captain under his uncle's command. Like other Ottoman captains, he operated a galley, a shallow oar-driven warship well suited to the Mediterranean coasts.

During the 1499 Battle of Zonchio, Piri Reis piloted one of the 270 Ottoman ships that broke through the 150-ship Venetian fleet to enter the Gulf of Corinth, forcing the Venetian governor to surrender. After further victories under Kemal Reis at Modon and Navarino, the Ottoman Navy began to consolidate control over the Eastern Mediterranean. Piri Reis returned to the Western Mediterranean, raiding the coasts of Spain and nearby islands in 1501 alongside his uncle.

In a naval battle near Valencia, they captured a Spaniard who said he had sailed with Columbus and likely possessed one of the explorer's charts of the Americas. They also seized exotic New World materials, including parrot feathers and unusual black stones, possibly obsidian, that could cut metal. In 1502, Piri Reis and his uncle returned to Constantinople and resumed hostilities with Venice.

Piri Reis last saw his uncle in 1510. He was the captain of his own ship, but Kemal Reis remained his mentor, commanding officer, and patron. They returned from Tripoli in North Africa, where the locals had asked Kemal Reis to become their governor and protect them from Spain. On 25 July 1510, Spain seized Tripoli while the Ottomans were still traveling to Constantinople. In the capital, Sultan Bayezid II tasked Kemal Reis with delivering aid to Egypt against Portuguese incursions, though Piri Reis remained in Europe. Kemal Reis drowned at sea; his ship sank in a storm near the island of Samos. News of his death reached Cairo in February 1511, and a Venetian report claimed that Kemal Reis had been sabotaged when İskender Ağa—a rival who became admiral of the Ottoman Navy in 1511—sent Kemal to sea in "an unsound ship". The Kitab-ı Bahriye contains a eulogy for Kemal Reis:

Many men go off thinking they will return: those who do not are those who knew little about where they were going. Behold Kemal Reis: he left intending to return but failed and sank at sea. Though his fame was once spoken of by all, now even his name is lost and gone. This world is vanity; it is every man's lot to live and die. While in the service of Sultan Bayezid, the angel of death caught him upon the sea.

— Piri Reis, Kitab-ı Bahriye

After his uncle died, Piri Reis returned to Gelibolu to focus on his cartographic work. There, he completed the world map for which he is best known today. Dated to Muharram 919 AH in the Islamic calendar (March 1513 AD), the manuscript depicts the recently explored shores of the Americas and Africa. When Piri Reis resumed sailing along the North African coast, he did so under the corsair Hayreddin Barbarossa. Around 1515, to establish ties with the new sultan, Selim I, Hayreddin sent a captured ship laden with wood to Constantinople under Piri Reis's command—a delivery the sultan rewarded with two galleys and a robe of honor.

During the 1516–1517 Ottoman conquest of Egypt, Piri Reis commanded the ships blockading Alexandria, and after the empire's victory, he presented his 1513 world map to Sultan Selim I. How Selim used the map is unknown, as it vanished from history until its rediscovery centuries later.

His relationship with the Ottoman state frayed after the conquest of Egypt, when he was among several captains who left the Ottoman Navy. Contemporary historian Marino Sanuto the Younger wrote that they "rebelled against the sultan" and "were able to land 800 men"—including relatives of Kurtoğlu Muslihiddin Reis—on the island of Chios, where they captured a castle and "400 of the sultan's subjects" in February 1518. When Venetian ambassador Alvise Mocenigo returned from Constantinople, his ship's captain steered into a storm rather than risk capture by Piri Reis. The rebellion continued into May, when he was recorded raiding the island of Euboea and the coast near Athens. It was short-lived: Kurtoğlu was given command of an Ottoman fleet in 1518, and Piri Reis was back in Ottoman service before the conquest of Rhodes.

The reasons for his brief defection remain unknown. By 1522, Piri Reis rejoined the Ottoman Navy and took part in Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent's Siege of Rhodes, for which he had advocated. Controlled by the Knights of St. John, the island provided shelter to Christian pirates.

Suleiman became sultan in 1520, and craftsmen across the empire presented exemplars of their work in hopes of winning favor. By 1521, Piri Reis had offered the first version of the Kitab-ı Bahriye, a nautical atlas that included advice on conquering Rhodes. There is no evidence the gift received any response. A second version, completed after the conquest, only discussed the siege of Rhodes in terms of acquiring drinking water.

When putting down Hain Ahmed Pasha's 1524 rebellion in Egypt, the Ottoman grand vizier and sultan's childhood friend Pargalı Ibrahim Pasha rode aboard the navy's flagship, commanded by Piri Reis. The two pashas were unrelated; the title was the highest the sultan bestowed on Ottoman officials. The longer second version of the Kitab-ı Bahriye resulted from a conversation with the grand vizier, who asked about the maps and charts used aboard the ship. Ibrahim commissioned the expanded atlas, which Piri Reis presented to the sultan by 1526. Ibrahim Pasha was executed in 1536, and no surviving works of Piri Reis's cartography date past this point.

While Piri Reis disappeared from Ottoman records between his 1528 map and his 1547 appointment in Egypt, Venetian sources tracked his actions as a recurring threat to the Republic, which still held the islands of Cyprus and Crete. In 1532, he led an eight-vessel squadron against pirates in the Adriatic, the arm of the Mediterranean leading into the Gulf of Venice. After Charles V's admiral Andrea Doria conquered Ottoman-held Coron in the Peloponnese that same year, Piri Reis besieged its Spanish garrison with a larger squadron of ten galleys and five fustas (lighter, more maneuverable raiding vessels). As his squadron closed in to bombard the fortress, his own galley was struck by return fire before withdrawing. In 1536, before the outbreak of open war, Piri Reis seized the galley Contarina near Venetian Cyprus, and refused to return its cargo of precious stones on the grounds that the ship had been carrying Muslim prisoners.

When the Third Ottoman–Venetian War broke out in 1537, he pursued Venetian ships across the Eastern Mediterranean and served under Hayreddin at the siege of Corfu. In late 1546, six years after peace was restored between the empire and Venice, Piri Reis attacked the Venetian ship Liona, killing twelve sailors, wounding twelve more, and taking others captive. Venice's diplomat in Constantinople obtained an imperial order for their release, but Grand Vizier Rüstem Pasha sided with Piri Reis's counter-claim that the Venetians had been the aggressors.

After the death of Yahudi Sinan, who was organizing a raid against the Portuguese, Piri Reis was promoted to Hind Kapudan-ı Derya or grand admiral of the Ottoman fleet in the Indian Ocean. Some sources characterize this as a dual appointment that also made him admiral of the fleet in Egypt (Mısır Kapudan-ı Derya). Before departing, Piri Reis sold off his properties in Constantinople: his home, garden, and vineyard. He left with his family and all of his money, suggesting he did not plan to return. Piri Reis then took command of the empire's Indian Ocean fleet, based out of Suez, Egypt, a significant port in the Gulf of Suez at the northern tip of the Red Sea.

Grand admiral of the Indian Ocean fleet

When Piri Reis arrived in the Red Sea, the Portuguese Navy employed sailing ships capable of navigating the open ocean, while the Ottoman Navy relied mainly on galleys, which were more effective along coasts. This limited Ottoman naval warfare to the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the narrow straits around Arabia. Cut off from the Mediterranean by the Isthmus of Suez, the Red Sea required a separate fleet and supply chain.

Shortly before Piri Reis's promotion to admiral in Egypt, the empire lost Aden, a port straddling the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. A disastrous Ottoman campaign to expand territory inland had caused a rebellion, and Aden's urban leaders had ceded their city to a local Arab chief who sought Portuguese protection. The most senior remaining Ottoman leader in Yemen, Özdemir Pasha, wrote to the governor of Egypt to seek his assistance. At that time, Piri Reis was leading a galley squadron from Alexandria and was the highest-ranking naval officer in the region.

On 29 October 1547, Piri Reis left Suez with a fleet of sixty ships. He landed reinforcements beyond the range of Aden's cannons, hauled artillery into the hills overlooking the city, and brought the fleet into Aden's crescent-shaped bay. The two Portuguese ships that arrived were not enough to stop the fleet or the land army that quickly overran the city. The citadel of Aden fell to Piri Reis on 26 February 1548. Reinforcements arrived too late. In January 1549, Portuguese ships found the Ottoman Navy already in the bay and attempted to flee, but Piri Reis's fleet pursued them, captured the sailors, and burned their ships.

Following his success at Aden, Piri Reis was rewarded with a timar—a type of Ottoman land grant that came with annual tax revenue—worth 100,000 silver coins, and he received the assignment that would lead to his death. Sultan Suleiman instructed him to take Hormuz Island, which Portugal had controlled since 1515. Located at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, the island could control sea traffic. Taking Bahrain Island was a secondary objective. In April 1552, Piri Reis left Suez with twenty-five galleys, five sailing ships, and 850 soldiers. Well after the fleet had left Suez, Rüstem Pasha, who had previously offered Piri Reis protection during his dispute with Venice, was dismissed from his position as Grand Vizier. Historian Maria Pedani has suggested that losing this court ally may have weakened Piri Reis's political position as the Hormuz expedition faltered.

The Sultan's official plan had been for Piri Reis to slip past the Portuguese unnoticed and merge his Suez fleet with a recently formed Ottoman fleet in the Persian Gulf. However, a Portuguese galley captained by Simão da Costa spotted the five-galley advance squadron, led by Piri Reis's son Mehmed, and raced ahead to warn Hormuz. Piri Reis then decided to attack the Portuguese strongholds directly. In August, the Ottoman fleet took Muscat after a month-long siege. The Portuguese garrison was captured and forced to work the oars on galleys in the fleet.

The Ottomans pillaged the area, destroyed fortifications, and continued to Hormuz. The expedition cleared the Arabian Peninsula coast of Portuguese occupation, and Portuguese forces prepared for the coming attack on Hormuz by evacuating most of the island. Wealthy residents took refuge on the nearby island of Qeshm, and the Portuguese soldiers and the Hormuz royal family retreated to the fortress.

Piri Reis's forces entered the city of Hormuz in September 1552, but could not take the fortress. They besieged and bombarded it for several weeks. The Ottoman forces ran low on gunpowder during the siege and Piri Reis wrote to Basra for supplies, but the Ottoman governor there, Kubad Pasha, sent nothing. The 16th-century Portuguese historian Diogo do Couto wrote that Kubad Pasha was instructed to assemble a naval force large enough to deliver 15,000 men to Hormuz, but these reinforcements never arrived. Acting on the advice of the imprisoned Portuguese commander from Muscat, Piri Reis grew increasingly concerned about a possible Portuguese counterattack in October. On the ninth, he lifted the siege.

The Ottomans looted the city of Hormuz, plundered the nearby island of Qeshm, and retreated into the Gulf with over a million pieces of gold. A letter from the Portuguese governor inside the fortress, dated 31 October 1552, explained how close the siege had been: the walls were nearly collapsing when the Ottomans ran low on "munitions, gunpowder, and other war materials". The Portuguese governor of India, Afonso de Noronha, organized a fleet of forty ships led by his nephew that reached Hormuz a month after Piri Reis's departure.

The Ottoman fleet retreated into the Persian Gulf, bypassed its secondary target, Bahrain, and arrived at Basra by 1553. There, Kubad Pasha, who had failed to send supplies during the siege, refused to provide rowers for the galleys. Soucek suggested that hostility between the two men "may have been at the root" of Piri Reis's decision to return to Egypt quickly as well as the "accusatory report the pasha probably sent to Constantinople." Leaving most of the fleet behind, Piri Reis returned with only two ships in 1553.

Ottoman histories faulted him for plundering Qeshm, and the gold he brought back to Egypt played a role in his death sentence. Although allegations of outright bribery were unjustified, they may have been believed at the time of his execution. Contemporary Ottoman historian İbrahim Peçevi wrote that "although the bribe charge was implausible – the [sultan] deigned to believe it and issued an order of execution." Venetian diplomats in Constantinople sent a letter dated 15 November 1553 stating that Piri Reis had been "charged with having raised the siege of the fortress of Hormuz because of bribery" and replaced. The sultan had him beheaded in Cairo in late 1553. When a delegation from Hormuz traveled to Constantinople to demand compensation for the looted gold shortly after Piri Reis's death, they were dismissed for lack of proof. According to Soucek, this "suggests that no effort had been made to probe" the allegations against Piri Reis before his execution. Soon after the execution, Seydi Ali Reis attempted to bring Piri Reis's Basra fleet back to Suez, but the Portuguese intercepted them, and the ships were captured, destroyed, or lost at sea.

Legacy

Piri Reis's cartography received limited appreciation during his lifetime. Soucek said that his works "show that although the Ottoman Empire had the potential to participate in the discoveries, its ruling elite spurned the attempt to blaze a trail in this direction." For example, Ottoman historian Cengiz Orhonlu, examining 16th-century Turkish authors who wrote about Piri Reis's execution, found that they criticized his performance during the Siege of Hormuz but did not discuss his maps or writing. Among his contemporaries, Piri Reis was not highly regarded as a seafarer: his reputation was overshadowed by his uncle's, and both were surpassed by later sailors such as the Barbarossa brothers, Hayreddin and Aruj.

There is no evidence that either version of his atlas circulated outside the royal palace prior to 1550. Copies produced after Piri Reis's death were often created for their aesthetic value rather than practical navigation. No Turkish school of cartography or navigation emerged to build on his work. Murat Reis the Elder's expedition to the Canary Islands and the 1586 Sack of Lanzarote were among the few times when Piri Reis's Atlantic cartography was likely used by the Ottoman Navy. The empire's navy—even during the Canary Islands expedition—remained largely composed of oar-driven galleys past the point when other naval powers were moving to sailing ships better suited to the open oceans. Ottoman scholar Kâtip Çelebi built on the Kitab-ı Bahriye in his 17th-century work, Müntehab-ı Bahriyye. Çelebi added new charts of his own, and he updated the atlas's maps and prose, drawing on Western sources. By the 18th century, major works of cartography from Western Europe were being translated into Turkish.

When Piri Reis's world map was unearthed in 1929, it received international media attention. After the Ottoman Empire was defeated in the First World War, the Republic of Turkey was founded within its diminished borders just six years before the discovery. Seeing the map as evidence of the Turkish people's potential to build a modern nation, the republic's first president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk took a personal interest in it and initiated projects to publish facsimiles and conduct further research. Discovered during Atatürk's reforms to modernize Turkey, it became a point of national pride, and its rediscovery sparked interest in the Kitab-ı Bahriye. A facsimile of the book's second version was published by the Turkish Historical Society in 1935, and a four-volume photographic facsimile followed in 1988.

In the 21st century, Piri Reis is remembered as a cartographer more than a corsair or an admiral. Christine Isom-Verhaaren argues that the Kitab-ı Bahriye offers, within its navigational details, a snapshot of the Mediterranean world at a point of major geopolitical transformations. Piri Reis recorded firsthand the fall of Muslim power in Iberia, the rise of Habsburg power in Europe, the discovery of the Americas, and the Ottoman conquest of the Eastern Mediterranean. His world maps show how close he came to drawing the Ottomans into the Age of Discovery by synthesizing Portuguese, Spanish, Arab, and Classical sources, though his cartographic ambitions were twice rejected by sultans who took the empire down a different path. Beyond scholarly recognition, ships and submarines have been named after him, including the RV K. Piri Reis and TCG Pirireis. His name was also given to the Piri Reis University for maritime studies, founded in 2008. Historian Karen Pinto has commented that popular interest in his cartography has contributed to Piri Reis becoming "more famous than the Sultan who" executed him.

Popular fiction and speculation

Piri Reis's 1513 world map has inspired pseudoscientific claims and appeared in popular culture as an unsolved mystery. For example, civil engineer Arlington Mallery, history professor Charles Hapgood, and Hapgood's students developed the hypothesis that the 1513 world map exceeded 16th-century map-making abilities and contained a cartographic depiction of an ice-free Antarctic coast. In Hapgood's 1966 book Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, he claims that islands along the map's southern Atlantic shore depict what are now ice-covered mountains in Antarctica's Queen Maud Land region.

Hapgood's book received skepticism for its lack of evidence and its reliance on cataclysmic pole shift, the disproven geological hypothesis that Earth's entire crust could slip around the planet. According to geologist Paul Heinrich, the book did not account for post-glacial rebound, the process by which land rises after glacial ice melts away. Heinrich further noted that the 1949 survey initially cited by Mallery could not measure even one percent of the area drawn in the Piri Reis map. Subsequent studies have shown no significant similarities between the map's southern coastline and Antarctica's subglacial coast. A 2024 study indicates that the Antarctic ice sheet began forming about 34 million years ago and covered the continent millions of years before the emergence of modern humans. Although the 1513 world map has been described by some authors as anomalous in its accuracy, it is no more precise than other 16th-century manuscript maps.

Hapgood's claims have nevertheless been uncritically repeated by Erich von Däniken in support of ancient astronauts and by Graham Hancock in support of an advanced lost civilization. The map and the pole shift hypothesis were key plot elements in Allan W. Eckert's science fiction novel The HAB Theory. Video game writer Corey May cites pseudohistory as an influence on his work for Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed series. He said that Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision appealed to him for its "idea of unraveling historical mysteries" regardless of whether he believed it. Assassin's Creed: Project Legacy introduces the 1513 Piri Reis map as an artifact derived from a lost civilization, and Piri Reis himself appears as a character in Assassin's Creed Revelations. The franchise's conception of Piri Reis as recording information from a prehistoric map of the planet draws on Hancock and similar authors.