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Piri Reis (full name Hajı Ahmed Muhiddin Piri; Reis was a Turkish military rank equivalent to that of captain) was an Ottoman admiral, geographer and cartographer born between 1465 and 1470 and died in 1554 or 1555.<br/><br/> He is primarily known today for his maps and charts collected in his Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation), a book which contains detailed information on navigation, as well as very accurate charts (for its time) describing the important ports and cities of the Mediterranean Sea. He gained fame as a cartographer when a small part of his first world map (prepared in 1513) was discovered in 1929 at the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. His world map is the oldest known Turkish atlas showing the New World, and one of the oldest maps of America still in existence in the world (the oldest known map of America that is still in existence is the map drawn by Juan de la Cosa in 1500, which is conserved in the Naval Museum (Museo Naval) of Madrid, Spain). Piri Reis' map is centered on the Sahara at the latitude of the Tropic of Cancer.<br/><br/> In 1528 Piri Reis drew a second world map, of which a small fragment (showing Greenland and North America from Labrador and Newfoundland in the north to Florida, Cuba and parts of Central America in the south) still survives. According to his imprinting text, he had drawn his maps using about twenty foreign charts and mappae mundi (Arab, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Indian and Greek) including one of Christopher Columbus.
For centuries Venice was Europe’s prime trading partner with the Middle East and the Byzantine Empire in particular. Venetian naval and commercial power was unrivalled in Europe until it lost a series of wars to the Ottoman armies in the 15th century. The city lost some 50,000 people to the Black Death in 1575-77, but remained a major manufacturing center and port well into the 18th century.