The three ships were armed with a battery of eight 21-centimeter (8.3 in) guns mounted in a central, armored casemate, and were capable of a top speed of 13.28 knots (24.59 km/h; 15.28 mph).

The ships had fairly uneventful careers, owing in part to the restricted naval budgets of the 1870s and 1880s, which precluded an active fleet policy.

Kaiser Max was transferred to the Royal Yugoslav Navy in the postwar peace negotiations and renamed Tivat.

In the early 1870s, the head of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, Friedrich von Pöck, repeatedly tried to secure funding from parliament for new ironclad warships, but the government, preoccupied with rebuilding the Austro-Hungarian Army after its crushing defeat at the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866, refused to divert funds to the navy's budget for new ships.

[2] Reconstruction projects were uncontroversial, however, and so Pöck requested funds to rebuild the old Kaiser Max-class ironclads, intending instead to use the money to build new ships.

To complete the deception, he assigned the ships the same names, which has led to some confusion in subsequent histories,[3][4] including accepting Pöck's lie that they were the same vessels, despite noting the different dimensions of the hulls.

[5] Part of the confusion owes to the records in the Austrian state and military archives, which refer to the ships as simple conversions, not new constructions.

[4][10] Their propulsion system consisted of one horizontal, single-expansion, 2-cylinder steam engine that had been salvaged from the earlier Kaiser Maxes.

Only the two strakes of the belt armor were newly manufactured; the rest of the iron used to protect the casemate deck came from the earlier Kaiser Max class.

In 1881, Prinz Eugen was mobilized for the first time to take part in an international naval demonstration against the Ottoman Empire to force it to transfer the city of Ulcinj to Montenegro in accordance with the terms of the 1878 Congress of Berlin.

Italy refused to relinquish Vulkan, the fate of which is unknown, but Kaiser Max was transferred to Yugoslavia and renamed Tivat.

[4] The ship was either scrapped in 1924,[16] or kept in the Yugoslav inventory until the country was overrun in the Axis invasion during World War II, her fate after falling back into Italian hands unknown.