Geo-information heritage contained within Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation): The Sicily Island

Historical cartography is a fundamental part of Cultural Heritage for its valuable content related to spatial reference as well as its artistic value. The importance of cartographic heritage mainly seems to base upon the spatial and time-related information within historical maps and other connected materials. The historical cartographic products portrayed a particular moment in the past, and represent a starting point for detecting physical and cultural changes in the environment through the time, in the studies, ranging from environmental to cultural, geographic or administrative tasks. The comparison of historical cartography with modern data gives an opportunity to interpret the spatial and the time scale of environmental and anthropogenic changes on the content. In this paper, one of the leading works of Piri Reis, Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation) that is a book of geography and an atlas of the Mediterranean Sea is studied. Kitab-ı Bahriye combines numerous charts and maps with geo-information relating to the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean Sea. The Sicily Island is selected as the case study from Kitab-ı Bahriye. In conjunction with the medieval Islamic literature (Book of Curiosities and Book of Roger), the geographical and spatial information about the Sicily Island from Kitab-ı Bahriye were compared with the modern data to evaluate the reliability of the unique geo-information stored in Kitab-ı Bahriye as a historical data source.