Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Coğrafya ve Kartografya
The Eastern Adriatic Coast in the Narratives of the Early-Modern Ottoman Navigator and Cartographer, Piri Reis
Dubravka Mlinaric, Josip FaričićThe aim of this chapter is to show the contribution of Pîrî Reis and his work Kitâb-ı Bahriye (a high-quality mixture of nautical charts and narrative sailing manual) to a better, more comprehensive and improved understanding of the geographical features of the eastern-Adriatic coast and sailing routes. Therefore, the authors will qualitatively compare some of his nautical charts with a selection of contemporary Italian nautical charts and maps to find specific innovations in his approach. Pîrî Reis’s excellent surveying and cartography of some of today’s Croatian ports and coasts proved his ability to obtain fairly accurate information about the Dalmatian territories under Venetian rule, which were hardly accessible to him as an Ottoman naval officer. Regardless of whether he obtained his data from precise cartography or some other reliable source of spatial data, and regardless of the origin of the data he used, the knowledge presented in his nautical charts additionally testified to his rich personal navigational experience. Moreover, he contributed to the transmission of geographical information by adopting, transposing and transforming it in the most appropriate way. This also testifies to the openness of an Ottoman navigator and cartographer to the transcultural exchange of knowledge in the Adriatic region of the 16th century