Piri Reis

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Pîrî Reis statue in the Museum of the Seas in Mersin (Turkey)

Piri Reis ( Ottoman پیری رئیس Pīrī Reʾīs ; * around 1470 in Gallipoli ( Anatolia ); beheaded 1554 in Cairo ) was a Turkish admiral of the Ottoman fleet and cartographer . He wrote an important book about seafaring in the Mediterranean and collected and created numerous maps, of which the so-called map of Piri Reis from 1513, which was only discovered in 1929, is the most famous today.

Life

Piri Reis' travels

His name was actually Turkish. Muhiddin Piri b. Hacı Mehmed . Later his Ottoman title of Admiral (رئیس / reʾīs ) used as a salutation or name. Muhiddin was born in Gelibolu around 1470 to a family from Karaman. His father was Hacı Mehmed, his mother was the sister of the famous and notorious pirate of the Ottoman Empire, Kemal Reis . Around 1481 he followed his uncle Kemal Reis to the Mediterranean and took part in the war against the Republic of Venice . In 1495 the pirate Kemal Reis joined the Ottoman fleet to fight in the 3rd Venetian Turkish War. So he received the Turkish title "rice". The uncle captured seven Spanish ships in the sea battle (other sources speak of a pirate company) of Valencia in 1501 and on them a nautical map of the "western region", which is said to have been drawn by Columbus . In general, there were no major successes, as the pirate tactics were unsuccessful against the disciplined fleets of Venice and Spain. However, even in civil service, Kemal Reis could not be prevented from attacking Western European merchant ships as an independent pirate, which caused problems in peacetime, e.g. B. brought in with the knights of Rhodes.

Copy of a portola map of Europe, North Africa and the Mediterranean, bound in a copy of the 2nd version of the '' Kitab-ı Bahriye.

When his uncle died in a shipwreck near Naxos in 1511, Piri went to Gelibolu and started writing his Kitab-ı Bahriye (كتاب بحریه / Kitāb-ı Baḥrīye  / 'Seafarer's Book'). In 1513 he drew his first world map. It was based on around 20 maps and mappae mundi , one of which is said to date from the time of Alexander the Great. As he spoke Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish in addition to Turkish, he was able to access and process foreign language sources.

From 1516 he was the captain of the Ottoman fleet in the Mediterranean Sea and in the waters around the Arabian Peninsula. In 1517 he showed Sultan Selim I his first world map. In 1516/17 he took part in the campaign against Egypt and completed his Kitab-ı Bahriye in 1521 . In 1522 he took part in the successful siege of the island of Rhodes . In later years he was the Turkish governor in Egypt, wrote poetry and continued to write his sailing instructions in lyrical form.

In 1524 he was the captain of the ship that brought the Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha to Egypt. After revising the Kitab-ı Bahriye on the advice of the Grand Vizier, he was able to present it to Sultan Suleyman I in 1525 . In 1528 he gave the Sultan his second map of the world.

Ottoman fleet in the Indian Ocean. 16th century drawing

In 1547 Piri Reis was appointed commander in chief of the Ottoman fleet in the Indian Ocean (Hind Kapudan-i Derya) and admiral of the fleet in Egypt (Misir Kapudan-i Derya) with a base in Suez . On February 26, 1548 he succeeded in retaking the city of Aden , which was occupied by the Portuguese . In 1552 he took the important base of Muscat, which had been occupied by Portugal since 1507 . Shortly afterwards he conquered the island of Kisch . With 31 ships and over 800 soldiers, he besieged the island of Hormuz in 1552/53 . The island's population offered him great treasures, which he accepted and lifted the siege of the island in return. On his way back to Suez he was informed that a powerful Portuguese fleet was blocking the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Piri Reis then had the captured treasures reloaded onto three ships and left the bulk of his fleet (28 ships) in safe Al-Basra. With the three ships he tried to break through the Portuguese blockade, which succeeded with the loss of one ship. After his arrival in Egypt, his political opponent for the post of governor there only reported to the sultan that Piri Reis had arrived with only two ships from his fleet (of originally 31 ships). Nor did he mention either the rescue of the fleet in Al-Basra or the treasures on the two ships. Sultan Suleiman furiously ordered the death penalty for Piri Reis, who was publicly beheaded in 1554 at the age of 84. With him, one of the outstanding cartographers of the Ottoman Empire died. His sailing instructions were copied many times because of the illuminated detailed representations of ports and bays, but their content hardly exceeded previous compilations, such as the "Compasso de Navegare" and other printed sea manuals, such as the Isolario by Dalli Sonetti.

Works

  • The port of Marseille from the Kitab-ı Bahriye

literature

  • Ayşe Afetinan : Life and works of Pirî Reis: the oldest map of America (= Türk Tarih Kurumu yayınları. Dizi 7, 69a.1) 2nd edition, TTK Basımevi, Ankara 1987.
  • Paul Kahle : The lost Columbus map from 1498 in a Turkish map of the world from 1513 . de Gruyter, Berlin / Leipzig 1933.
  • Paul Kahle (Ed.): Piri Re'îs. Bahrîje. The Turkish sailing manual for the Mediterranean Sea from 1521, edited, translated and explained . de Gruyter, Berlin 1926.
  • Peter Mesenburg: Cartometric investigation and reconstruction of the world map of Pīrī Reʿīs (1513) . In: Cartographica Helvetica. Volume 24, 2001, pp. 3-7 ( full text ).
  • Dimitri Michalopoulos: L'énigme de la carte de Piri Reis . In: Boletim da Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa , Vol. 134, No. 1-12 (January-December 2016), pp. 39–42, full text (PDF; 2.72 MB; French)
  • Gregory C. McIntosh: The Piri Reis map of 1513 . University of Georgia Press, Athens [u. a.] 2000, ISBN 0-8203-2157-5 .
  • Fuat Sezgin , Farid Benfeghoul (Ed.): Reprint of studies on the Ottoman cartographers Pīrī Reʾīs (d. 1554) and Ḥağğī Aḥmad (d. About 1560) (= Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science: Islamic Geography . Volume 22; Mathematical Geography and Cartography. Volume 12) Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, Frankfurt a. M. 1992.
  • Svat Soucek: Piri Reis and Turkish mapmaking after Columbus. 2. improved edition. Nour Foundation [u. a.], London 1996 (= Studies in the Khalili Collection, 2), ISBN 0-19-727501-X
  • CH Hapgood: Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings.

Web links

Commons : Piri Reis  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Idris Bostan. In: İslâm Ansiklopedisi , Volume 34, 2007, p. 283
  2. ↑ Peter Hertel, Gisela Klügel-Hertel: Unsolved riddles of old maps of the earth . VEB Hermann Haack Verlag, Georgraphisch-Kartografische Anstalt Gotha 1988, 5th edition, ISBN 3-7301-0615-5 , p. 25
  3. ^ Peter Mesenburg: Cartometric investigation and reconstruction of the world map of the Piri Re'is (1513) . In: Cartographica Helvetica , 24, 2001, p. 5
  4. ↑ Bacchisio Raimondo Motzo (ed.): Lo Compasso de Navigare. Opera Italiana della meta del secolo XIII. Cagliari 1947.
  5. ↑ Bartolomeo Dalli Sonetti: Isolario (1485) . Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Amsterdam 1972.
personal data
SURNAME Piri Reis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES پیری رئیس (Arabic)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Turkish admiral of the Ottoman fleet and cartographer
DATE OF BIRTH around 1470
PLACE OF BIRTH Gelibolu (Turkey)
DATE OF DEATH 1554
Place of death Cairo