Ottoman ship Mahmudiye
Mahmudiye in Istanbul
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| History | |
|---|---|
 Ottoman Empire
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| Name: | Mahmudiye |
| Owner: | Ottoman Navy |
| Builder: | Imperial Arsenal, Constantinople |
| Launched: | 1829 |
| Decommissioned: | 1874 |
| Honours and awards: |
Title of Gazi awarded to the ship for her role during the Siege of Sevastopol (1854–1855) |
| Fate: | Broken up |
| General characteristics | |
| Displacement: | unknown |
| Length: | 76.15 m (249.8 ft) |
| Beam: | 21.22 m (69.6 ft) |
| Armament: | 128 guns on three decks |
Mahmudiye was a ship of the line of the Ottoman Navy. She was a three-masted three-decked 128-gunned sailing ship, which could perhaps be considered to be one of the few completed heavy-first rate battleships. Mahmudiye, with a roaring lion as the ship's figurehead, was intended to serve to reconstitute the morale of the nation after the loss of the fleet at the Battle of Navarino in 1827. The flagship was for many years the largest warship in the world.
The 201 × 56 kadem (1 kadem = 37.887 cm) or 76.15 m × 21.22 m (249.8 ft × 69.6 ft) ship of the line carried 1,280 sailors on board.
She was a 120-gun ship of the line, with guns ranging from 3-pounders to massive 500-pounders that fired stone shot. These guns were mounted on the broadside across three decks. At the time of her completion, she was the largest sailing ship ever built.
She was constructed by the naval architect Mehmet Kalfa and the naval engineer Mehmet Efendi on the order of Mahmud II (reigned between 1808–1839) at the Imperial Arsenal, on the Golden Horn in Constantinople.
At the outbreak of the First Egyptian–Ottoman War in 1831, prompted by the Egyptian invasion of Palestine, Mahmudiye was already in poor condition, despite being only a few years old. Much of her hull was dry-rotted, though she still served as the Ottoman flagship during the war. During the war, the Ottoman fleet, along with a squadron from the British Royal Navy blockaded the main Egyptian naval base at İskenderun. This included a long-range bombardment on 18 August 1831. The war ended in 1833 following the intervention of Russia on behalf of the Ottoman government and pressure from Britain, France, and Austria on Egypt to withdraw, but unresolved tensions between the Eyalet of Egypt and the central government resulted in the Second Egyptian–Ottoman War of 1839–1841.
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