Ottoman ship Mahmudiye

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.



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 Tersane-i Amire, the Imperial Shipyard, on the Golden Horn in Constantinople.

The 201 × 56 kadem (1 kadem = 37.887 cm) or 76.15 x ship of the line carried 1,280 sailors on board (kadem, which translates as "foot", is often misinterpreted as equivalent in length to one imperial foot, hence the wrongly converted dimensions of "201 × 56 ft, or 62 × 17 m" in some sources.)

With the introduction of steam power in the end of the 1840s, it was considered to convert the pure sail-driven ship into a steamer. However, due to lack of the necessary space for the steam engine on board, the idea could not be realized.

Mahmudiye participated in many important naval battles, including the Siege of Sevastopol (1854–1855) during the Crimean War (1854-1856) under the command of Admiral of the Fleet Kayserili Ahmet Pasha. She was honored with the title Gazi following her successful mission in Sevastopol.

She was decommissioned in 1874 and broken up at the Imperial Shipyard.