Stationed in the Adriatic Sea, Erzherzog Ferdinand Max served as the flagship of the Austrian fleet under Rear Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff.

The construction of the five ironclad warships of the Drache and Kaiser Max classes in the Austro-Italian ironclad arms race prompted the Austrian government to convene a commission in early 1862 to study future naval development, and crucially, the question of whether the navy should be oriented toward power projection from the Adriatic or purely defensive of the Austrian Littoral.

The commission had deadlocked by April, but the recent Battle of Hampton Roads in the American Civil War—the first engagement between two ironclads—had demonstrated the ascendancy of the new ships and convinced the Reichsrat (Imperial Council) to grant a significant increase for the naval budget, which allowed two new ironclads to be ordered in 1863, which became the Erzherzog Ferdinand Max class.

Her propulsion system consisted of one single-expansion steam engine, manufactured by the Stabilimento Tecnico shipyard in Fiume, that drove a single screw propeller.

Tegetthoff received a series of telegrams between the 17 and 19 July notifying him of the Italian attack, which he initially believed to be a feint to draw the Austrian fleet away from its main bases at Pola and Venice.

The Austrian ship's ram tore a gaping hole in Re d'Italia's hull on the port side, though Erzherzog Ferdinand Max sustained no significant damage herself.

Instead, he ordered the aviso Kaiserin Elizabeth to remain behind and pick up the survivors while Erzherzog Ferdinand Max engaged San Martino.

Persano broke off the engagement, having lost two ships, and though his squadron still outnumbered the Austrians, he refused to counter-attack with his badly demoralized forces.

A few armor plates were slightly dislodged, the paint had been stripped from the hull where she had collided with Re d'Italia, and she had a minor leak from the concussion, but she was otherwise unscathed.

[2] As a result of Austria's defeat, Kaiser Franz Joseph was forced to accede to Hungarian demands for greater autonomy, and the country became Austria-Hungary in the Ausgleich of 1867.

[12] The two halves of the Dual Monarchy held veto power over the other, and Hungarian disinterest in naval expansion led to severely reduced budgets for the fleet.

[16] In 1869, Erzherzog Ferdinand Max was assigned to a squadron sent to patrol the Levant in the eastern Mediterranean; she served as the flagship of Rear Admiral Friedrich von Pöck.

From there, the ships sailed on to Urla, where Pöck received orders to return to Smyrna to await instructions to join Franz Joseph for the opening of the Suez Canal.

While waiting for Franz Joseph to arrive, Erzherzog Ferdinand Max moved to Çanakkale to take on coal on 26 October; there, she met the Italian ironclad Roma, which had carried Vice Admiral Prince Amadeo for a visit to Constantinople.

[17] In the meantime, the Kaiser was taking a tour of the countries of the eastern Mediterranean Sea; he came aboard his yacht Greif after arriving in Constantinople.

After passing through the Dardanelles, they were joined by Erzherzog Ferdinand Max, her sister ship Habsburg, and a pair of paddle steamers, which then escorted the Kaiser for the trip to Port Said at the mouth of the Suez Canal.

The two ironclads remained in the Mediterranean while the other vessels passed through the Canal into the Red Sea in company with Empress Eugenie of France aboard her own yacht.