Piri Reis Map (1513): The Ottoman Map of the Atlantic World

The Piri Reis map is a world map drawn on parchment in 1513 by the Ottoman sailor Piri Reis at Gallipoli. Only a fragment survives, showing the Atlantic Ocean with the coasts of Europe, Africa and the newly encountered Americas. It is one of the oldest surviving maps to show the New World, and its maker wrote that he had used a map drawn by Christopher Columbus, a source that has otherwise been lost.

Background

In the early sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire was a major Mediterranean sea power, and its sailors watched the Spanish and Portuguese voyages closely. Piri Reis, whose full name was Ahmed Muhiddin Piri, was born around 1465 to 1470, probably in Gallipoli, the main Ottoman naval base on the Dardanelles. As a young man he sailed with his uncle, the corsair and later admiral Kemal Reis, in raids and naval campaigns across the western Mediterranean.

During these years Piri Reis collected charts and information from sailors and captives of many nations. Ottoman mariners were in contact with Spanish, Portuguese, Genoese and Venetian seamen, and charts circulated through capture, trade and copying. Piri Reis later explained that he had drawn on about twenty earlier maps to compile his own.

Making the map

According to its own inscriptions, the map was completed in Gallipoli in the Islamic year 919, which corresponds to 1513. It was drawn and painted on gazelle-skin parchment in the style of a portolan chart, the type of nautical chart used by Mediterranean sailors. The colours were added by hand, and small pictures of ships, animals and rulers decorate the open spaces, a style shared with other luxurious charts of the period. Such charts show coastlines, harbours and islands in detail, with networks of straight lines radiating from compass roses to help with navigation.

The original was a world map. What survives appears to be its western part, perhaps a third of the whole. The fragment measures less than a metre on its longest side and covers the Atlantic from the Iberian Peninsula and West Africa to the Caribbean and the coast of South America.

Piri Reis is said to have presented his map to Sultan Selim I in 1517, around the time of the Ottoman conquest of Egypt, though this is based on later accounts rather than a record on the map itself.

What the map shows

The map is full of notes in Ottoman Turkish written across land and sea. In one of the longest, Piri Reis lists his sources: maps from the time of Alexander the Great based on Ptolemy, an Arab map of India, four recent Portuguese maps of the Indian Ocean and China, and a map drawn by Columbus of the western regions.

Another note tells the story of how a Genoese man named “Colombo” persuaded the Spanish to give him ships and sailed west to discover new lands. Piri Reis says that the coasts and islands on his map were taken from Columbus’s map.

The Caribbean section shows Hispaniola, Cuba and many smaller islands, though in distorted shapes and positions. Hispaniola, for example, is drawn with a north–south orientation, and the island labelled as Cuba is thought by some scholars to reflect Columbus’s belief that Cuba was part of the Asian mainland. Further south runs the long coastline of South America, decorated with pictures of animals, a mountain range and imaginary creatures. Among them is a headless man with his face on his chest, a figure borrowed from ancient and medieval tales of distant lands.

The lost Columbus map

The map’s greatest value for historians lies in its claim to preserve a lost source. No map by Christopher Columbus of the lands he reached survives. If Piri Reis did use one, then his map offers an indirect glimpse of how Columbus himself pictured the Caribbean after his early voyages.

Scholars such as Gregory McIntosh have compared the map in detail with other early charts, including the Portuguese Cantino planisphere of 1502. They have found features that fit what is known of Columbus’s ideas, such as island names and positions recorded during his voyages. Others caution that Piri Reis combined many sources and that it is hard to separate one from another. The question remains open, but the Columbus connection is widely taken seriously.

Rediscovery in 1929

For four centuries the map lay forgotten in the library of Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, the former residence of the Ottoman sultans. In 1929, after the palace had become a museum, the German theologian and scholar Gustav Adolf Deissmann came across it while cataloguing the collections.

The discovery caused excitement in the young Republic of Turkey, where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk took a personal interest. Turkish scholars published studies and facsimiles in the 1930s, and the map became a national symbol of Ottoman scientific achievement. A second, smaller fragment of a later world map by Piri Reis, dated 1528, also survives in Topkapı.

Myths and facts

From the 1950s the Piri Reis map attracted claims that it held secret knowledge. The best known is that it shows an ice-free Antarctica. This idea was popularised by the American academic Charles Hapgood in his book Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966), who argued that the map copied lost charts of an advanced ancient civilisation. The Swiss writer Erich von Däniken went further in the late 1960s, suggesting that it reflected views from the air or from space.

Historians of cartography reject these claims. The coastline at the bottom of the map bends sharply eastward, but this is best explained as the South American coast turned to fit the edge of the parchment, a common practice on portolan charts. Antarctica’s coastline has been under thick ice for millions of years, long before humans existed. The map also contains errors that are typical of early sixteenth-century European knowledge, not of a precise ancient survey.

Piri Reis and the Book of the Sea

Piri Reis’s other great work is the Kitab-ı Bahriye, or Book of the Sea, completed in 1521 and revised in an expanded edition presented to Sultan Suleiman in 1526. It is a detailed guide to the coasts, harbours, islands and dangers of the Mediterranean, with more than 200 charts in its fuller copies. It shows the practical sailing knowledge that also went into the 1513 map.

Later in life Piri Reis served as an admiral of the Ottoman fleet in the Indian Ocean, based at Suez. In 1552 he led a campaign against the Portuguese, capturing Muscat but failing to take the fortress of Hormuz. On his return he was accused of failure and executed in Cairo in 1553, when he was in his eighties.

Key people

• Piri Reis (c. 1465/70 – 1553): Ottoman sailor, admiral and cartographer who drew the map.
• Kemal Reis (c. 1451–1511): his uncle, a leading Ottoman naval commander, under whom Piri Reis trained.
• Christopher Columbus: whose lost map Piri Reis named as a source.
• Selim I: Ottoman sultan to whom the map is said to have been presented in 1517.
• Gustav Adolf Deissmann: German scholar who identified the map in Topkapı Palace in 1929.

Timeline

• c. 1465–1470: Piri Reis is born, probably in Gallipoli.
• 1492: Columbus makes his first voyage across the Atlantic.
• 1513: Piri Reis completes his world map at Gallipoli.
• 1517: The map is said to have been presented to Selim I in Egypt.
• 1521: Piri Reis completes the first version of the Kitab-ı Bahriye.
• 1528: He draws a second world map, of which a fragment survives.
• 1553: Piri Reis is executed in Cairo.
• 1929: Gustav Adolf Deissmann rediscovers the 1513 map in Topkapı Palace.

Legacy

The Piri Reis map is now one of the most famous objects in Turkey’s cultural heritage and is displayed only rarely to protect it. It shows that knowledge of the voyages of Columbus reached Istanbul within two decades and that Ottoman mapmakers took part in the new age of exploration. Alongside the Waldseemüller map of 1507, it is a key document for understanding how the Americas first appeared on paper. Ottoman interest in the Americas did not end with Piri Reis: around 1580 an anonymous Ottoman author compiled the Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi, or History of the West Indies, a book describing the Spanish discoveries for readers in Istanbul. The Ottoman naval tradition it represents also produced commanders such as Hayreddin Barbarossa.

Why it matters

The Piri Reis map is a rare surviving witness to the earliest European maps of the Americas, possibly including one by Columbus himself. It also shows the Ottoman Empire as an active participant in the exchange of geographical knowledge, and its later myths are a reminder of how easily old maps can be misread.