Becket, December 23, 2012
Piri Reis--the Ottoman admiral of
the 16th century--was an exquisite mapmaker. He is best known for some of the earliest world maps including
the American continent (yes, he was a contemporary of Martin Waldeseemüller,
the German cartographer that first labeled the continent after Amerigo Vespucci.) Piri also drew some remarkable maps of
cities around the Mediterranean.
His 1525 map of Cairo shows the
city right at the beginning of the Ottoman rule, so it's more or less the the city left by the Mamluk Sultanate after 250 of energetic urban development. Like so many maps of
Cairo, the drawing is prominently crossed from top to bottom by the Nile, with a hint of
its delta at the bottom (means that north is down.) It shows a large, dense, and heavily fortified agglomeration
some distance away to the east of the river. A number of major monuments appear prominently, including
Salah al-Din's Citadel towards the south, and the aqueduct that reaches
the Nile at the great tower built by al-Nasir Muhammad in the early
1300's. My guess it that the big
domed structure south of the Citadel is the Ibn Tulun Mosque, but I could be wrong. No doubt about the three pyramids of
Giza on the western side of the Nile.
(By the way, and this is definitely a non sequitur, as an admiral in the Ottoman Navy, Piri fought in Lepanto. That means that on the day of that battle, our mapmaker coincided, even if in opposite sides, with Miguel de Cervantes, the author of "Don Quijote".)
(By the way, and this is definitely a non sequitur, as an admiral in the Ottoman Navy, Piri fought in Lepanto. That means that on the day of that battle, our mapmaker coincided, even if in opposite sides, with Miguel de Cervantes, the author of "Don Quijote".)
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