15th-16th century
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Kemal Reis
Kemal Reis was an Ottoman corsair and admiral, born around 1451, who began his career raiding Christian shipping in the western Mediterranean before entering Ottoman state service. Starting in 1487 he helped defend the last Muslim territory in Spain, and after the fall of Granada in 1492 he carried thousands of Muslim and Jewish refugees…
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Piri Reis
Piri Reis was an Ottoman corsair who began raiding Mediterranean shipping in the 1480s alongside his uncle, the corsair captain Kemal Reis, before turning to naval cartography after Kemal’s death around 1510. He later served in the Ottoman navy under admirals including Hayreddin Barbarossa and eventually commanded Ottoman fleets in the Red Sea and Indian…
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Pier Gerlofs Donia
Grutte Pier: a Frisian farmer turned rebel and pirate whose real campaign against Habsburg rule in the 1510s was later inflated into tales of a seven-foot giant.
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Arquebus
An early matchlock long gun, among the first practical firearms, adopted in East Asia after Portuguese traders introduced the design in the mid-16th century. Wokou pirate bands operating along the Chinese coast acquired Portuguese firearms and gunners to arm and crew their vessels. It represented the first widespread use of gunpowder small arms in East…
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Bill (Polearm)
An English polearm derived from the agricultural billhook, fitted with a hooked, chopping blade on a long shaft, carried by English ships’ crews and coastal defenders of the Tudor period. Large numbers of bills were recovered from the wreck of Henry VIII’s warship Mary Rose, illustrating how common the weapon was aboard English vessels of…
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Carrack
The carrack was a large, multi-decked ocean-going ship used by Iberian powers for exploration and trade before being succeeded by the galleon. Heavily laden carracks were prime targets for early corsairs and privateers along Atlantic and Mediterranean trade routes.
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Caravel
The caravel was a small, highly maneuverable Portuguese and Spanish sailing ship with lateen or mixed rigging, originally developed for exploration but also used for coastal raiding and light combat in the 15th and 16th centuries. Its shallow draft and agility made it useful for both trade voyages and predatory raiding along African and Iberian…