The ship was laid down at the French Forges et Chantiers de la Gironde shipyard in 1867, was launched in 1868, and was commissioned into the Ottoman fleet in March 1870.

The ship saw action in the Russo-Turkish War in 1877–1878, where she supported Ottoman forces in the Caucasus, and later helped to defend the port of Sulina on the Danube.

[1][2] Asar-i Şevket, meaning "Work of God",[3] was originally ordered by the Eyalet of Egypt, a province of the Ottoman Empire, in 1866 from the French Forges et Chantiers de la Gironde shipyard in Bordeaux under the name Kahira.

Egyptian efforts to assert their independence angered Sultan Abdülaziz, who, on 5 June 1867, demanded Egypt surrender all of the ironclads ordered from foreign shipyards.

During this period, the Ottoman fleet, under Hobart Pasha, remained largely inactive, with training confined to reading translated British instruction manuals.

[5] Early in the ship's career, the Ottoman ironclad fleet was activated every summer for short cruises from the Golden Horn to the Bosporus to ensure their propulsion systems were in operable condition.

Hobart Pasha took the fleet to the eastern Black Sea, where he was able to make a more aggressive use of it to support the Ottoman forces battling the Russians in the Caucasus.

[11] By the end of June, Asar-i Şevket was transferred to the port of Sulina at the mouth of the Danube, along with the ironclads Muin-i Zafer and Hifz-ur Rahman.

One of the boats succeeded in detonating its spar torpedo under Asar-i Şevket's hull and claimed to sink her, but the ironclad was undamaged in the attack.

The British naval attache to the Ottoman Empire at the time estimated that the Imperial Arsenal would take six months to get just five of the ironclads ready to go to sea.

During a period of tension with Greece in 1886, the fleet was brought to full crews and the ships were prepared to go to sea, but none actually left the Golden Horn, and they were quickly laid up again.

[2] At the start of the Greco-Turkish War in February 1897, the Ottomans inspected the fleet and found that almost all of the vessels, including Asar-i Şevket, to be completely unfit for combat against the Greek Navy.