Aziziye, named for Sultan Abdülaziz, was the second of four Osmaniye-class ironclad warships built for the Ottoman Navy in the 1860s.

The ship was laid down at the Robert Napier and Sons shipyard in 1863, was launched in January 1865 and was commissioned in August that year.

Among the more powerful of Ottoman ironclads, the Navy decided to keep the ship safely in the Mediterranean Sea during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 to preserve the vessel.

[1][2] The ship was powered by a single horizontal compound steam engine which drove one screw propeller.

She was launched in January 1865 under her original name, but by the time she was commissioned into the fleet in August that year, she had been renamed Aziziye, another reference to the sultan.

[1][3] 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.

At the start of 1877, the ship was assigned to the 2nd Division of the Mediterranean Fleet, based in Crete, along with the ironclads Mukaddeme-i Hayir and Iclaliye.

[6] The wooden warships of the Mediterranean Fleet sortied in April 1877 to patrol the coast of Albania, but Aziziye and the rest of the ironclads remained in Souda Bay.

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.

On 19 March, Aziziye and the ironclads Mesudiye, Hamidiye, and Necm-i Şevket and three torpedo boats departed the Golden Horn, bound for the Dardanelles.

The Ottomans inspected the fleet and found that almost all of the vessels, including Aziziye, to be completely unfit for combat against the Greek Navy, which possessed the three modern Hydra-class ironclads.

During this period, she, Necm-i Şevket, and the river monitor Hizber escorted troop transports from western Anatolia to Gelibolu, though their presence was simply for show.

Following a lengthy process of negotiations, Krupp received the contract to rebuild Aziziye on 11 August 1900, along with several other warships.