Mystifying the Map of Piri Reis
This site attempts to mystify the 1513 Piri Reis map of the world, including the New World, produced in Istanbul. It is alleged that it shows the coast of Antarctica as well as more South American detail than is reasonable for that date. It was based on Ptolemaic, Arab and recent Portuguese maps.
Professor Steve Dutch of the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay, has relentlessly debunked spurious claims about the map, showing that it is based on perfectly ordinary Portuguese maps of Piri Reis's own day, and contains nothing that they would not have known. He maintains that the bottom line sometimes thought to be the Antarctica coast is just a mistakenly rendered Tierra del Fuego.
It took Dutch a lot of time to painstakingly debunk the pseudoscience here, and we should all be grateful to him.
By the way, the Ottomans were locked in a kind of world war with the Portuguese (or Spanish/Portuguese) in that period, in the Mediterranean, in the Persian Gulf and in the Red Sea. Some historians have speculated that Ottoman military movements into North Africa may have been intended to get them to the Atlantic such that they could make a bid for colonies in the New World itself. Was Piri Reis's map a war plan for an Ottoman colony in Brazil?
As it happened, although Salih Reis did briefly take Morocco and get to the Atlantic in the 1530s, the Ottomans soon lost the toehold. They were defeated in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea by the Portuguese.
Andras Riedlmayer kindly adds:
' The conquest of northern Morocco by Ottoman admiral Salih Reis (1553) proved to be short-lived. But even without a Moroccan port, the Ottoman fleet managed to make its presence felt far beyond the Straits of Gibraltar.
Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, Ottoman corsairs based in Algiers ventured out into the Atlantic as far as the Canary Islands to raid Spanish and Portuguese treasure ships returning from the New World.
And in 1627, an Ottoman fleet of 15 ships (12 galleys and 3 other types of vessels), led by Murad Reis, sailed 2000 miles beyond the Straits of Gibraltar into the North Atlantic, raided an island off Iceland and took 400 captives back to Algiers.
Ottoman strategic and scientific interest in the New World also did not end with Piri Reis.
Those interested can find more information in Thomas E. Goodrich's fascinating book,
The Ottoman Turks and the New World. A study of 'Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi' and sixteenth-century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden, 1990).'
Ottoman Empire in 1580
posted by Juan Cole @ 12/05/2008 12:05:00 PM
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Coincidentally, I just finished re-reading Ernle Bradford's excellent book, "The Great Seige" which I recommend to everyone!
-JCrawford
caravel > trireme.
(much to venetian chagrin as well.)
fun post, thanks.
The conquest of northern Morocco by Ottoman admiral Salih Reis (1553) proved to be short-lived. But even without a Moroccan port, the Ottoman fleet managed to make its presence felt far beyond the Straits of Gibraltar.
Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, Ottoman corsairs based in Algiers ventured out into the Atlantic as far as the Canary Islands to raid Spanish and Portuguese treasure ships returning from the New World.
And in 1627, an Ottoman fleet of 15 ships (12 galleys and 3 other types of vessels), led by Murad Reis, sailed 2000 miles beyond the Straits of Gibraltar into the North Atlantic, raided an island off Iceland and took 400 captives back to Algiers.
Ottoman strategic and scientific interest in the New World also did not end with Piri Reis.
Those interested can find more information in Thomas E. Goodrich's fascinating book,
The Ottoman Turks and the New World. A study of 'Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi' and sixteenth-century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden, 1990).
cool !
Piri Reis - gee, he's in my Age-of-Empire-3 game! Apparently that bigoted game is good for something...
I thought that maps of the new world were top secret. So how did the Ottamans get that information? The official date for the discovery of Brazil is 1500 by Cabral. So 13 years later the Islamo Fascists have a complete map. I think liberals in the map department gave it to them out of some misplaced sense of fairness. I say the house needs to investigage Un-Portugese activity. This site is a disgrace, now I understand why we are losing the war terror. Don't get a false sense of security from that map, they have maps of Michigan too.
The controversy of the map is the same as every other controversy that acribes to magic or alien technology any accomplishments which do not fit our cultural narrative of the progress of history.
In fact, all great advances are followed by great retreats. Our own history is a perfect example - we went to the moon, and since then no human has been beyond low earth orbit. What the Apollo program did with vacuum tubes and slide rules we can't accomplish with microprocessors.
Records are lost, or were never made. But in all likelihood Europeans and Asians and Africans had been visiting the New World for hundreds if not thousands of years before Chris sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety-two.
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