François Baron de Tott, a French officer and advisor to the Ottoman military, was appointed for the establishment of a course to provide education on plane geometry and navigation.

The course, attended also by civilian captains of the merchant marine, was given on board of a galleon anchored at Kasımpaşa in Istanbul and lasted three months.

[3] The temporary course turned into a continuous education on land with the establishment of "Naval Mathematical College" in February 1776.

On October 22, 1784, the college, renamed the "Imperial Naval Engineering School" (Ottoman Turkish: Mühendishâne-i Bahrî-i Hümâyûn), started its education for three years in the new building.

It was decided that until the completion of the new facility, the navigation division of the school be transferred temporarily to Heybeliada, an island in the Sea of Marmara.

The facilities of the naval school on Heybeliada consisted of 34 rooms for 150 cadets, a 30-bed hospital with a pharmacy, a printing house with a bookbinder's shop, and a rich library.

The admission to the Naval School resumed in 1924 after the proclamation of the Republic, and the cadets could study in one of the three fields such as navigation, engineering and secretary work.

When Germans began to occupy the Balkans in 1941 during World War II, the Naval School was relocated to Anatolia.

The transfer of the academy to a more convenient location arose as a necessity, due to increasing demands of the Turkish Navy over personnel and place as well as transportation problems of the island of Heybeliada.

A new campus was projected over 3,000-acre (12 km2) land at Tuzburnu peninsula on the northern shore of Marmara Sea in Tuzla district of Istanbul.

For the training of officers for the marines and engineering corps branches, graduates of civilian high schools were admitted in 1995 to the first class.

The same year, the "Naval Sciences and Engineering Institute" was founded for postgraduate studies in order to meet the needs of the Turkish Armed Forces, starting from 2001–02 academic term.

According to military training cooperation agreements signed with friendly and allied countries, guest students, especially from Turkic Republics as well as from Albania and Pakistan were admitted in the 1993–94 academic year.