Much of Piri Reis's biography is known only from his cartographic works, including his two world maps and the Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Maritime Matters) completed in 1521. He sailed with his uncle Kemal Reis as a Barbary pirate until Kemal Reis received an official position in the Ottoman Navy in 1495. In one naval battle, Piri Reis and his uncle captured a Spaniard who had participated in Columbus's voyages, and who likely possessed an early map of the Americas that Piri Reis would use as a source. When his uncle died in 1511, Piri Reis temporarily retired to Gallipoli and began composing his first world map. The finished manuscript was dated to the month of Muharram in the Islamic year 919 AH, equivalent to 1513 AD. Piri Reis returned to the navy and played a role in the 1517 conquest of Egypt. After the Ottoman victory, Piri Reis presented the 1513 world map to Ottoman Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–1520). It is unknown how Selim used the map, if at all, as it vanished from history until its rediscovery centuries later.

Scholars unearthed a fragment of the map in late 1929. During the conversion of the Topkapı Palace into a museum, the Director of National Museums Dr. Halil Edhem Eldem invited German theologian Gustav Adolf Deissmann to tour its library. Deissmann persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a project to preserve ancient manuscripts from the palace library. Halil Edhem gave Deissmann unprecedented access to the library's collection of non-Islamic items. Deissmann confirmed the collection to have been the vast private library of Mehmed II (r. 1444–1481) and—based on Mehmed II's interest in geography—asked Halil Edhem to search for potentially overlooked maps. Halil Edhem found a disregarded bundle of material containing an unusual parchment map. They showed the parchment to orientalist Paul E. Kahle, who identified it as a creation of Piri Reis citing a source map from Colombus's voyages to the Americas. Kahle, and later scholars analyzing the map, found evidence for an early origin in the voyages of Columbus. The discovery of a surviving piece of an otherwise lost map of Christopher Columbus received international media attention. Turkey's first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, took an interest in the map and initiated projects to publish facsimiles and conduct research.

Kept in the Topkapı Palace Museum, the map is the remaining western third of a world map drawn on gazelle-skin parchment approximately 87 cm × 63 cm. The surviving portion shows the Atlantic Ocean with the coasts of Europe, Africa, and South America. The map is a portolan chart with compass roses from which lines of bearing radiate. Designed for navigation by dead reckoning, portolan charts use a windrose network rather than a longitude and latitude grid. There are extensive notes within the map. Written with the Arabic alphabet, the inscriptions are in Ottoman Turkish except for the colophon. The colophon is written in Arabic using a different handwriting from the other inscriptions. It was likely handwritten by Piri Reis, rather than assigned to a calligrapher.
The remaining third of the map focuses on the Atlantic and the Americas. In the top left corner, the Caribbean is arranged unlike modern or contemporary maps. The large island oriented vertically is labeled Hispaniola, and the western coast includes elements of Cuba and Central America. Inscriptions on South America and the Southern Continent cite recent Portuguese voyages. The distance between Brazil and Africa is roughly correct, and the Atlantic islands are drawn consistent with European portolan charts.

Many places on the map have been identified as phantom islands or have not been identified conclusively. İle Verde (Green Island) north of Hispaniola could refer to many islands. The large island in the Atlantic, İzle de Vaka (Ox island), corresponds to no known real or fictional island. Both an Atlantic island and the mainland of the Americas are referred to as the legendary Antilia.
According to the map's legend, it was based on:
• Twenty charts and Mappae Mundi
• Eight Jaferiyes (Geographia or Jughrafiya)
• An Arabic map of India
• Four newly drawn Portuguese maps of Asia
• A map by Christopher Columbus of the West Indies
There is some scholarly debate over the various sources. In the modern sense, mappae mundi refer to medieval Christian schematic maps of the world. In the fifteenth century, the term was also literally used to describe world maps, and it is possible the source maps fit in that broader definition. The Jaferiyes are seen by scholars as a corruption of the Arabic Jughrafiya, most often taken to mean the Geographia of Claudius Ptolemy. Ptolemy's book was widely printed during the sixteenth century, accompanied by maps from Nicolaus Germanus and Maximus Planudes. The Jaferiyes may also refer to the largely symbolic world maps of medieval Islamic cartography. Descended fro…

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Compared to the Islamic cartography of the era, the map shows an atypical knowledge of foreign discoveries. During the Age of Discovery, European voyages expanded the known world and disrupted the traditional conception of an "inhabited quarter" of the world comparable to the Greek ecumene. The attitudes towards the Age of Discovery within the Ottoman Empire ranged from passive indifference to the outright rejection of foreign influence.

Piri Reis synthesizes traditional worldviews with discoveries by undermining their newness, using rhetorical strategies to reframe European discoveries as the rediscovery of ancient knowledge. He invokes Dhu al-Qarnayn—believed to be a reference to Alexander the Great from the Quran—in his inscriptions regarding Columbus. According to the Quran and Turkish literary tradition, Alexander traveled to every corner of the world, thereby defining its limits. A marginal inscription describes world maps as "charts drawn in the days of Alexander". Another inscription mentions that a "book fell into the hands" of Columbus describing lands "at the end of the Western Sea". In the 1526 version of Piri Reis' atlas, the Kitab-ı Bahriye, he explicitly credits European discoveries to lost works created during legendary voyages of Alexander.

Compared to earlier portolan charts, the map shows gradual improvement. Portuguese source maps would have been similar to surviving maps like the 1502 Cantino Planisphere. Compared to the planisphere and the earlier map of Juan de la Cosa (1500): the Atlantic Ocean is accurate, South America is highly detailed, and the Caribbean is strangely organized. As a part of the expanding cartography of the sixteenth century, the map was soon surpassed. Piri Reis's own 1528 map included a more detailed and accurate version of the New World. Despite recent claims of an anomalous level of accuracy, Gregory McIntosh, in comparing it to several other portolan-style maps of the era, found that:

The Piri Reis map is not the most accurate map of the sixteenth century, as has been claimed, there being many, many world maps produced in the remaining eighty-seven years of that century that far surpass it in accuracy. The Ribeiro maps of the 1520s and 1530s, the Ortelius map of 1570, and the Wright-Molyneux map of 1599 ('the best map of the sixteenth century') are only a few better-known examples.