She was originally built for the Egyptian fleet in the early 1850s and was initially named Feyz-i Cihat before being given to the Ottoman sultan as a gift in 1862.

[3] After the work was completed, Ismail Selim Pasha, the Egyptian Minister of Military Affairs, presented the ship to the Ottoman sultan Abdulaziz as a gift.

[1] The ship carried Mehmed Fuad Pasha on a trip to meet with the Russian Tsar (Emperor) Alexander II in the Crimea in 1867.

[4] That year, Abdulaziz embarked on a tour of Western Europe that concluded with a stop in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; there, after meeting with Kaiser Franz Josef I, he boarded Sultaniye in Vienna and then steamed down the Danube to the Black Sea, and then home to the capital at Constantinople.

An Austro-Hungarian flotilla of ships, with Franz Josef I aboard one of them, escorted Sultaniye through the river as far as the border with the Ottoman Empire.

[6] During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, Sultaniye was used as a transport vessel supporting operations at Batumi in the eastern Black Sea.

Earlier in January, as Russian forces approached the Ottoman capital through the Balkans, several vessels began transporting a reserve army from Dedeagac to Gelibolu; Sultaniye and the ironclad warship Osmaniye joined the operation and carried the last elements of the army on 31 January.

In October 1911, after the start of the Italo-Turkish War, the garrison at İzmir prepared to scuttle the ship to block the harbor entrance.