She served with the Second Division of the Austro-Hungarian Navy's battleships and shelled Senigallia as part of the bombardment of the key seaport of Ancona, Italy, during May 1915.

On 10 November 1918, just one day before the end of the war, navy officers sailed the battleship out of Pola (Pula) and surrendered to a squadron of American submarine chasers.

[1] On the second cruise into the Aegean Sea, conducted from November to December, Zrínyi and her sister ships were accompanied by the cruiser SMS Admiral Spaun and a pair of destroyers.

The goal of the blockade was to prevent Serbian reinforcements from supporting the siege at Scutari,[10] where Montenegro had besieged a combined force of Albanians and Ottomans.

Pressured by the international blockade, Serbia withdrew its army from Scutari, which was subsequently occupied by a joint Allied ground force.

[18] Additional targets that were damaged or destroyed included wharves, warehouses, oil tanks, radio stations, and the local barracks.

[19] The objective of the bombardment of Ancona was to delay the Italian Army from deploying its forces along the border with Austria-Hungary by destroying critical transportation systems.

This delay gave Austria-Hungary valuable time to strengthen its Italian border and re-deploy some of its troops from the Eastern and Balkan fronts.

[8][21] Their operations were limited by Admiral Anton Haus, the commander of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, who believed that he would need to husband his ships to counter any Italian attempt to seize the Dalmatian coast.

Since coal was diverted to the newer Tegetthoff-class battleships, the remainder of the war saw Zrínyi and the rest of the Austro-Hungarian Navy acting as a fleet in being.

[22] With his fleet blockaded in the Adriatic Sea, and with a shortage of coal, Haus followed a strategy based on mines and submarines designed to reduce the numerical superiority of the Allied navies.

[23] After the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in 1918, the Austrians wanted to turn the fleet over to the newly created State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (later to become a part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) in order to prevent the Italians from claiming the ships as spoils of war.

They were soon spotted by heavy Italian ships, so the two battleships hoisted American flags and sailed south along the Adriatic coast to Castelli Bay near Spalato (also known as Split).

They appealed for American naval forces to meet them and accept their surrender, which a squadron of United States Navy (USN) submarine chasers in the area did.

The initial American complement consisted of four officers and 174 enlisted men—the latter entirely composed of United States Navy Reserve Force personnel.

The ship remained at anchor at Spalato for nearly a year during the allied occupation of the eastern Adriatic while the negotiations that would determine her ultimate fate dragged on.