In 1929, the Ottoman Empire was dissolved and the new nation of Turkey was going through painful rapid social changes under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Most importantly, they were changing their writing system from Arabic script to Latin. They were also removing Muslim clergy from positions of power and forcing men to shave beards and women to take off veils. And in the middle of all this, the Topkapı Palace was preparing to become a public museum.
In a corner of its library, they found some rolls of parchment and crumbling old books. One of the rolls of parchment turned out to be a sensation: it was a map signed by Piri Reis, a famous Muslim navigator. The map was dated 1513 and Piri’s notes claimed that he had consulted many even older maps. It had been given to Sultan Selim in 1517, probably not long after the mapmaker’s uncle Kemal Reis had defeated Venice in major sea battles.
The map’s parchment leather was the skin of a gazelle, suggesting it had been made in one of the ports of North Africa. In 1517, it may have been 90 cm by 65 cm, at its largest (modern) estimate. By 1929, only about one-third of the map remained, but this included the legend and notes by Piri Reis himself.
He used colored ink to make compass roses and the “windrose lines” that fan out from the compass in a classic portolan map. This map was developed for ship navigation; it showed coastal shapes very accurately, but sometimes its proportions or other measurements were off by modern standards. Still, the portolan map was the first really accurate, useful kind of map, from which our modern projections developed.
The map shows the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America, with the Atlantic and Caribbean Islands. It’s really beautifully done, too, with little paintings of tall-masted ships and sketches of native animals on the land. The parts that are filled in with accuracy and confidence look quite a lot like a modern map, for example, the coast of Brazil is pretty good. At the margins of knowledge, of course, the coast line goes wonky, which has led some people to speculate that aliens helped the ancients map Antarctica and Piri Reis got to see the last remaining copy. It’s more likely that nobody was sure what the remotest coast of South America was actually like; it was easy then to mistake a cape for a peninsula, if you didn’t go beyond it.
What drew the most attention when the map was identified in 1929 was that Reis’s notes claim that he used at least 20 earlier, older maps. He bought maps from the Portuguese showing the Indian Ocean and South America, and of course he used Arabic and Greek maps dating back to the Hellenic period. His most sensational claim was that he used a map from Qulunbu, that is, Columbus. It’s the kind of detail that we might consider a forgery if there weren’t so many other reasons to consider the map authentic.
The discovery set off a search in the Palace and other buildings to see if a map by Christopher Columbus had made its way to Turkey. So far, nothing has been found. It’s more likely that Piri consulted the map in North Africa, used it for some details, but never had it in his possession for long.
In some ways, the map sums up the whole panorama of history that I’ve been writing about: from Mohammed’s successors who set out to conquer the known world, to a Turkish or Moorish sea captain who could consult maps in four or five languages and create a map that’s almost good enough to use today, through its preservation in a Muslim palace in the former Christian capital to its discovery by a German philologist after the Allies had defeated both Germany and the Ottomans in one big final showdown, ending the Muslim empire. And at the end of it all, there’s this fabulous gazelle skin with graceful ships skimming across its leather, heading to the New World with Arabic notes.