When Halicarnassus entered the Ottoman world, it did not yet resemble a town in the modern sense. It was, above all else, a castle with a harbour — a maritime outpost clinging to the edge of the Aegean. The earliest Ottoman voice to describe it belongs to Piri Reis, the celebrated corsair, navigator, and cartographer whose Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of the Sea) mapped the Mediterranean with an accuracy astonishing for its age.