Ottoman ironclad Hamidiye

In 1861, Abdülaziz became sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and thereafter began a construction program to strengthen the Ottoman Navy, which had incurred heavy losses during the Crimean War of 1853–1856. He ordered several ironclad warships from shipyards in Britain and France, though the program was limited by the Ottoman Empire's limited finances. Hamidiye was one of a handful of ironclads to be ordered from the Ottoman Imperial Arsenal; her design was based on preceding, British-built Mesudiye-class central battery ships, albeit reduced in scale to the size of the earlier Osmaniye class. In addition, a protected rudder was incorporated into the hull.[1][2] She was the last ironclad to be built for the Ottoman Navy; two Peyk-i Şeref-class ironclads were ordered from Britain after Hamidiye, but both ships were purchased by the Royal Navy before completion.[3] She was also the last central battery ship to be completed, though the German Oldenburg was begun after Hamidiye, she was completed before Hamidiye entered service.[4] Lastly, she was the final ironclad of any type to carry muzzle-loading guns.[2]

Hamidiye was ordered from the Imperial Arsenal in 1871, originally under the name Nüsretiye, and was laid down there in December 1874. After the original Hamidiye, of the Mesudiye class, was purchased by the Royal Navy, Nüsretiye was renamed Hamidiye, in honor of Sultan Abdul Hamid I.[11] Work proceeded at an extremely slow pace, and she was launched or on 4 January 1885 and the following day, she was found to be filling with water, the result of a missing rivet in her keel.[12] She was finally ready for sea trials, though without her armament installed, by 1893. Fitting-out work was completed the following year, when she was commissioned into the Ottoman fleet,[3] though she remained in the Golden Horn until 1897.[9] By the time she entered service, she had been surpassed by the rapidly changing warship designs of the 1880s and 1890s, first by the turret ships such as the Italian Duilio type,[13] and then by modern pre-dreadnought battleships like the British Royal Sovereign class, which began to enter service the year before Hamidiye was commissioned.[14] Moreover, Hamidiye was equipped with poor quality armor and was difficult to handle, so she was employed as a stationary training ship for torpedo boat crews.[3][15][lower-alpha 1] In addition, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who had come to power in 1876 as a result of a coup in which the Navy had played a major role, distrusted the Navy and reduced its budgets to the minimum.[17]

With the outbreak of the Greco-Turkish War in February 1897, Hamidiye was mobilized into the I Squadron of the fleet. On 19 March, Hamidiye and the ironclads Mesudiye, Aziziye, and Necm-i Şevket and three torpedo boats departed the Golden Horn, bound for the Dardanelles. This was Hamidiye's first cruise since commissioning three years earlier, and she suffered severe boiler problems during the operation. The squadron stopped off Lapseki on 22 March, having lost two of the torpedo boats to unseaworthiness. The Ottomans inspected the fleet and found that almost all of the vessels, including Hamidiye—despite the fact that she had been completed three years previously—to be completely unfit for combat against the Greek Navy, which possessed the three modern Hydra-class ironclads.[18][19]

On 15 April, the British Admiral Henry Wood and the German Admiral Eugen Kalau vom Hofe began an inspection of the Ottoman fleet, which concluded that only a handful of ships were seaworthy, and as a result, should not be used offensively. Through April and May, the Ottoman fleet made several sorties into the Aegean Sea in an attempt to raise morale among the ships' crews, though the Ottomans had no intention of attacking Greek forces. On 15 May, Hamidiye and the ironclads Mesudiye, Necm-i Şevket, Osmaniye, and Aziziye, along with several other vessels conducted a major training exercise under the supervision of von Hofe, where severe deficiencies in the level of training were revealed, particularly with the men's ability to operate the ships' guns. In September 1897, the war came to an end, and the Ottoman fleet returned to Constantinople.[20]

The condition of the Ottoman fleet could not be concealed from foreign observers. The fleet proved to be an embarrassment for the government and finally forced Sultan Abdul Hamid II to authorize a modernization program, which recommended that the ironclads be modernized in foreign shipyards. German firms, including Krupp, Schichau-Werke, and AG Vulcan, were to rebuild the ships, but after having surveyed them, withdrew from the project in December 1897 owing to the impracticality of modernizing the ships and the inability of the Ottoman government to pay for the work due to its weak finances. Negotiations dragged on into the early 1900s, but Hamidiye was not included in the program. Instead, Hamidiye was decommissioned in 1903; the Ottoman Navy considered rebuilding the ship that year, like many of the other ironclads, but the ship was in too poor a condition to merit reconstruction. On 11 November 1909, she was placed for sale, and she was finally purchased by ship breakers in 1913 and thereafter dismantled.[10][21]

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