In the early 1860s, the Eyalet of Egypt, a province of the Ottoman Empire, ordered a series of ironclad warships from foreign shipyards.

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

Steam was provided by two coal-fired box boilers manufactured by Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino, which were trunked into a single funnel amidships.

[3][4] Iclaliye, meaning "Glorious",[5] had had her keel laid in May 1868; she was formally transferred to the Ottoman Empire on 29 August 1868, and she was launched the following year.

[1] 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.

[9] On 14 May 1877, an Ottoman squadron consisting of Iclaliye and the ironclads Avnillah, Muin-i Zafer, Feth-i Bülend, Mukaddeme-i Hayir, and Necm-i Şevket bombarded Russian positions around the Black Sea port of Sokhumi before landing infantry and arming the local populace to start an uprising against the Russians.

Over the course of the war, Russian torpedo boats made several attacks on the vessels stationed in the Black Sea, but Iclaliye was not damaged in any of them.

These attacks included one launched on 10 June by six torpedo boats, by which point Iclaliye had been transferred to the port of Sulina at the mouth of the Danube, along with Feth-i Bülend and Mukaddeme-i Hayir.

During this attack, the boat Chesma targeted Iclaliye, but defensive nets set up around the vessel prevented the torpedo from exploding against her hull.

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.

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 Iclaliye, to be completely unfit for combat against the Greek Navy, which possessed the three modern Hydra-class ironclads.

On 30 October 1912, during the First Balkan War, Iclaliye was reactivated to stop the Bulgarian advance against the Ottoman defenders at Çatalca.

She was joined by the ironclad Necm-i Şevket; both vessels had to be towed into place, and they remained in their firing positions for only a few days.

[18][19] The two ships, joined by the pre-dreadnought battleships Barbaros Hayreddin and Torgud Reis and the modernized ironclads Mesudiye and Asar-i Tevfik, were towed to Büyükçekmece, where they remained from 15 to 20 November, though they made little contact with Bulgarian forces.