Admirals and Navigators

Muslim states were land powers for much of their history, but from the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire built a navy capable of contesting the Mediterranean with the combined fleets of Spain, Venice, Genoa and the papacy. The men who commanded it were rarely products of the palace élite: they came from Aegean islands and Anatolian villages, learned their trade as corsair captains on the North African coast, and were absorbed into the imperial service on the strength of what they could do at sea.

This collection gathers those careers together with the knowledge that made them possible. It covers the brothers known to Europe as Barbarossa — Oruç Reis, who seized Algiers in 1516, and Hayreddin, who placed it under Ottoman sovereignty and went on to command the imperial fleet and win at Preveza; Turgut Reis, a former galley slave who became Pasha of Tripoli and died at the siege of Malta; and Piri Reis, cartographer of the Kitab-i Bahriye and of a world map drawing on a lost chart by Columbus. It also includes the astronomical and navigational sciences on which sailing depended.