“Hearken to the secrets I reveal and from them know and discern my aim”, wrote the Ottoman cartographer Piri Reis in his Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Seafaring). “It was with God’s guidance that it became my habit to roam the seas. And so it was: and were I to live forever I would always be at sea.”

Born circa 1465–70, likely in Gallipoli, Piri began his life on deck sometime around 1481, working as a corsair with his uncle, Kermal Reis, for the next fourteen years. It was an era of literal sea change: the sailors lived through the fall of the Emirate of Granada — a coastal stronghold and the last Muslim polity in Spain — heard news of the “discovery” of North and South America, and witnessed the Ottoman Empire’s fresh outposts in Algiers and Tripoli. In 1495, Piri and his uncle hung up their pirate hats and began serving sultan Bayezid II, assisting in military efforts during the Ottoman-Venetian war (1499–1502). Tragedy struck in 1511 when Kermal’s ship supposedly sank in a storm, causing Piri to write that “many men go off thinking they will return: those who do not are those who knew little about where they were going. . . The world is vanity; it is every man’s lot to live and die.”

Two years later, Piri started making maps that were among the most accurate of their time. First a world map, only one third of which survives, which synthesized learnings from thirty or so charts, including one supposedly made by Christopher Columbus that his uncle had pilfered from a Spanish ship off the coast of Valencia. On the strength of Piri’s cartographical wisdom, the grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha chose him to pilot a mission to Egypt, where the vizier was tasked with reforming the provincial civil and military administration following a revolt. Noticing Piri frequently consulting a version of the Kitab-ı Bahriye that the navigator had assembled in 1511, Ibrahim encouraged him to “polish up this book well, all of it, so that it may be much used, [wherever] there are those who will listen.” Piri did just that, dedicating a revised version of the book to Suleiman the Magnificent in 1521.

The Kitab-ı Bahriye, as scholar of Ottoman history Christine Isom-Verhaaren argues, records a contentious moment when “the eastern Mediterranean became Ottoman” and the western Mediterranean became a realm of naval skirmishes between the Ottomans and Hapsburgs of Spain. Both the original and revised manuscripts have been lost, but more than forty copies survive. The images featured here come from a manuscript copy made in the seventeenth or eighteenth century that is held by the Walters Art Museum. It contains more than 240 maps that collectively chart the coasts of the Aegean, Adriatic, Black, and Caspian seas, roaming from Palestine through North Africa to southern France. Illustrated in rich, primary colors, the coastlines have a looping, fractal quality that recall the edges of half-burnt leaves and pluming clouds of smoke. The maps are rendered mainly in a flat, planimetric view, but topographical elevation breaks perspective, for mountains get illustrated as they might appear when seen from afar by a navigator at sea, and are colored with a palette more common to candy stores than portolans.

We do not know what exactly led to Piri Reis’ demise. He commanded the 1548 reconquest of Aden, a former Ottoman territory in Yemen that had fallen under Portuguese control, and received a substantial financial reward for his victory. After a subsequent attack on Hormuz in Persia failed, Piri sailed to Cairo, where he was executed in 1554 due either to his errors at Hormuz or for “financial indiscretion”, according to Isom-Verhaaren. Words from the Kitab-ı Bahriye serve as a fitting memorial: “I have always been an eager and willing lover of the sea”, Piri wrote. “Knowledge is infinite. By no effort can its end be found.”