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 from Spain to Ottoman territory. Appointed an Ottoman admiral in 1495, he commanded one of the fleet’s great carracks in the 1499 naval battles off Zonchio during the Ottoman–Venetian War, and Sultan Bayezid II rewarded him with ten captured Venetian galleys. He was the uncle and mentor of the cartographer Piri Reis, who sailed with him on many of his expeditions and later drew on that experience in his own charts of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Kemal Reis died in 1511 when his ship was lost in a storm; news of his death reached the Ottoman capital that November.
Kemal Reis
