List of ironclad warships of the Ottoman Empire

Egyptian efforts to assert their independence angered Sultan Abdülaziz, who demanded Egypt surrender all of the ironclads it had ordered, which it did in 1868.

In 1871, the Ottomans ordered two Mesudiye-class ironclads from Britain, the second of which was purchased by the Royal Navy in 1878 in the midst of a war scare with Russia, and laid down a third vessel, Hamidiye, at the Imperial Arsenal.

Two final ships, the Peyk-i Şeref class, were ordered from Britain in 1874, but the Royal Navy bought both vessels during the 1878 war scare.

The navy embarked on a major reconstruction program aimed at modernizing the ironclads over the following decade, and many of the vessels were rebuilt or broken up.

In 1913, Asar-i Tevfik ran aground off the coast of Bulgaria; wave action coupled with Bulgarian artillery fire destroyed the ship.

By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, only Mesudiye served in an active capacity; the other surviving vessels had been reduced to secondary roles like training ships and floating barracks.

The Osmaniye class was the first group of ironclads ordered by the Ottoman government, part of a naval construction program to replace the heavy losses sustained during the Crimean War of 1853–1856.

[4] Fatih was laid down at the Thames Ironworks shipyard in London, England, in 1865, originally ordered by the Ottoman Empire.

[12] In the early 1860s, the Eyalet of Egypt, a province of the Ottoman Empire, ordered several ironclad warships for its fleet as part of a rearmament program to challenge the power of the central government for the first time since the Second Egyptian–Ottoman War, twenty years earlier.

Her battery of old muzzle-loading guns was replaced with new, medium-caliber breech-loaders, and she received additional armor protection and an entirely new propulsion system.

Starting in early 1913, Asar-i Tevfik transferred to the Black Sea to support Ottoman forces fighting the Bulgarian Army, and on 8 February she ran aground while conducting a bombardment.

During this period, she briefly saw action again during the First Balkan War, when she provided fire support to beleaguered Ottoman defenders protecting Constantinople from the Bulgarian Army.

[23] Egypt also ordered a pair of sea-going monitors, the Lütf-ü Celil class, the only vessels of that type built for the Ottoman Navy.

[27] Unlike most of the ironclads that served in the Ottoman fleet, the two Avnillah-class ships were actually ordered by the central government as part of its own reconstruction program.

[30][31] The Ottoman government ordered Feth-i Bülend from Britain in 1867, with a design based on the Avnillah-class ironclads, though with a simplified casemate to house the main battery.

[34] Like the rest of the Ottoman fleet, the two ships were laid up until 1897; Feth-i Bülend was reconstructed after the Greco-Turkish War but Mukaddeme-i Hayir was in too poor a condition to merit rebuilding.

During the First Balkan War, she was reactivated to provide gunfire support to the beleaguered Ottoman defenders at Çatalca, though she remained in service only briefly.

While Hamidiye was still under construction, the Royal Navy purchased the ship as a result of a war scare with Russia and renamed her HMS Superb.

She continued on in service during World War I, acting as a guard ship to protect the minefields laid to block the entrances to the Dardanelles, and it was in this role that she was torpedoed and sunk by the British submarine B11 on 13 December 1914.

[43][44] Hamidiye was the last ironclad warship to be completed for the Ottoman Navy, and one of the few such vessels to be built at the Imperial Arsenal in Constantinople.

She proved to be an unsatisfactory ship, the result of her very lengthy construction period—some twenty years long—that left her hopelessly obsolete by the time she entered service.

The Ottoman government considered rebuilding the ship as part of its reconstruction program that modernized several of the other ironclads in the early 1900s, but the proposal was abandoned in 1903 owing to Hamidiye's poor condition.

The ships carried a battery of four 305 mm guns in an armored casemate atop the main deck, though their primary offensive weapon was their ram bow.

These two ships, intended to be used in the eastern Mediterranean, were purchased by the Royal Navy in 1878 while still under construction; Peyk-i Şeref and Büruç-u Zafer were renamed Belleisle and Orion, respectively.

Since they had been designed to operate in the relatively calm Mediterranean, they were unsuitable for use on the high seas, and so they were employed as coastal defense ships in British service.