Reviewin Sixteenth Century Journal

Review of The Piri Reis Map of 1513
by Bronwen Wilson
Sixteenth Century Journal 32/4 (2001): 1228-1229
In 1513, Piri Reis. an Ottoman admiral and mapmaker, produced the first of his two naviga -
tional charts of the world. The book reviewed here is a study of the surviving western third of
this manuscript map on which many of the landmasses surrounding the Atlantic ocean are de-
picted. Since the discovery of the map in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul in 1929, the document
has been the subject of numerous studies and theories that Gregory McIntosh sets out to correct
or to refine. To this end, he provides a comparative analysis of the map, untangling a wealth of
Ottoman, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and ancient sources that were used by Piri Reis.
The short main text of the book comprises an introduction and eleven chapters. After intro-
ducing Piri Reis and describing the map as a whole, McIntosh turns to the contours of the coast-
lines, many of which are reproduced in line drawings to accompany the text. He begins with Eu-
rope and Africa before turning to the more contentious regions of the map, all of which he com-
pares to earlier sources that are included in an appendix.
Airplanes and aliens are among the radical theories that have been posited to explain the ap -
parent accuracy with which the continent now known as South America and the Antarctic were
depicted, the latter as it would appear without its mantle of ice. Chapter 6 provides a fascinating
account of such ideas (the focus of dozens of Internet sites on the Piri Reis map) including the
existence of Atlantis: the Antarctic in its pre-Ice Age incarnation. As McIntosh demonstrates,
both scholars and enthusiasts of earlier advanced civilizations have overlooked the voyages of
the Portuguese to South America from 1500 to 1513, despite the mapmaker ‘s identification of
these sources. Further, the striking visual resemblance of Terra Australis to the Antarctic can be
explained by what were long-standing geographical theories about a southern landmass in antiq-
uity. McIntosh shows that identifying features on the map on the basis of their resemblance to
modern maps is fraught with perils by reminding the reader of contemporary ideas—legendary
and hypothetical lands—which would have impinged on Piri Reis. The author’s painstaking
analysis of the map’s coastlines, the most important contribution of the book, demonstrates
where earlier researchers went astray.
McIntosh’s most interesting historical argument can be found in his support for a claim made
by an earlier student of the map, Paul Kahle, who suggested that areas documented by Piri Reis
were drawn from a copy of a Columbian map. Citing the inscription on the Ottoman map, McIn-
tosh explains that the Columbian map was obtained by the uncle of Piri Reis, presumably from a
Spanish prisoner of war taken near Valencia in 1501. This intermediary, he argues, must have
been responsible for conflating sometimes incorrect details from the first two voyages of Colum-
bus with his third, on which the Spaniard may have ventured. The source map, however, must
have been made from information garnered during Columbus’s second voyage in 1494 and tran-
scribed in copies produced in 1495-1496. To account for the irregularities that Piri Reis must
have copied from this “primitive” map, McIntosh describes Columbus as a better navigator than
geographer, to which his poor health and possible nervous breakdown upon his return to
Spain may have contributed.
Chapter 8, “Puerto Rico and the Lesser Antilles,” offers some intriguing details on how
Columbus named sites, but this emphasis on toponyms also points to the author ‘s disciplinary
approach. McIntosh ‘s comparative method similarly reveals the modern geographer’s preoccu-
pation with accuracy, even as he acknowledges that it was less of a concern for early modern
mapmakers. Thirty-four figures reconstruct the geographical contours seen in the map, and eight
tables compare place-names, but there is no discussion of the map’s function as a representation,
despite its extraordinary pictorial qualities, barely visible in the single meager black and white
photograph of the manuscript. The author makes only a fleeting reference to color, and even
here, only to point out that place-names and islands were depicted in red. In contrast to printed
maps that circulated established geographical knowledge, manuscript maps were valued for their
up-to-date information—for both navigation and for exploration and conquest—and this may
help to explain McIntosh’s focus on the contours and toponyms. However, the Piri Reis map is
among those navigational charts that were “richly illuminated” and both of his world maps were
presented respectively to Selim the Conqueror and Suleiman the Magnificent. That the fascinat-
ing imagery that embellishes the chart is virtually ignored was a great disappointment to this
reader, for in sixteenth-century maps, it is the representational features that are so revealing
about the historical conditions in which they were made and viewed.
Bronwen Wilson
McGill University

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