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The Ottoman Navy () or the Imperial Navy (), also known as the Ottoman Fleet, was the Navy of the Ottoman Empire. It was established after the Ottomans first reached the sea in 1323 by capturing Praenetos (later called Karamürsel after the founder of the Ottoman Navy), the site of the first Ottoman Shipyard and the nucleus of the future navy.
During its long existence, the Ottoman Navy was involved in many conflicts and signed a number of maritime treaties. It played a decisive role in the conquest of Constantinople and the subsequent expansion into the Mediterranean and Black Seas. At its height in the 16th century, the Navy extended to the Indian Ocean, sending an expedition to Indonesia in 1565, and by the early 17th century operated as far as the Atlantic Ocean. Commensurate with the decline and modernization of the empire in the late 18th century, the Ottoman Navy stagnated, albeit remaining among the largest in the world: with nearly 200 warships, including 21 battleships, it ranked third after the British and French navies in 1875.
For much of its history, the Navy was led by the Kapudan Pasha (Grand Admiral; literally "Captain Pasha"); this position was abolished in 1867, when it was replaced by the Minister of the Navy () and a number of Fleet Commanders ().
After the end of the Ottoman Empire and the declaration of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the Navy's tradition was continued under the modern Turkish Naval Forces.
Seljuq sultan of Rûm Kayqubad I conquered Alaiye (Alanya) and formed a naval arsenal there. Alanya became the homeport of the Seljuk fleet in the Mediterranean Sea. Kayqubad I later formed a fleet in the Black Sea based in Sinope (Sinop), which, under the command of Chupan, conquered parts of the Crimea and Sudak on the Sea of Azov (1220–1237).
In 1373 the first landings and conquests on the Aegean Sea shores of Macedonia were made, which was followed by the first Ottoman siege of Thessaloniki in 1374. The first Ottoman conquest of Thessaloniki and Macedonia were completed in 1387. Between 1387 and 1423 the Ottoman fleet contributed to the territorial expansions of the Ottoman Empire on the Balkan peninsula and the Black Sea coasts of Anatolia. Following the first conquests of Venetian territories in Morea, the first Ottoman-Venetian War (1423–1430) started.
In the meantime, the Ottoman fleet continued to contribute to the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the Aegean and Black Seas, with the conquests of Sinop (1424), Smyrna (1426) and the reconquest of Thessaloniki from the Venetians (1430). Albania was reconquered by the Ottoman fleet with landings between 1448 and 1479.
In the following period the Ottoman fleet gained more territory in the Aegean Sea, and in 1475 set foot on Crimea on the northern shores of the Black Sea. Until 1499 this was followed by further expansion on the Black Sea coasts (such as the conquest of Georgia in 1479) and on the Balkan peninsula (such as the final reconquest of Albania in 1497, and the conquest of Montenegro in 1499). The loss of Venetian forts in Montenegro, near the strategic Herceg Novi, triggered the Ottoman-Venetian War of 1499–1503, during which the Turkish fleet of Kemal Reis defeated the Venetian forces at the Battle of Zonchio (1499) and the Battle of Modon (1500). By 1503 the Ottoman fleet raided the northeastern Adriatic Sea coasts of Italy, and completely captured the Venetian lands on Morea, the Ionian Sea coast and the southeastern Adriatic Sea coast.
According to Kâtip Çelebi a typical Ottoman fleet in the mid-17th century consisted of 46 vessels (40 galleys and 6 maona's) whose crew was 15,800 men, roughly two-thirds (10,500) were oarsmen, and the remainder (5,300) fighters.Ottoman Warfare 1500–1700, Rhoads Murphey, 1999, p. 23
In 1527 the Ottoman fleet participated in the conquest of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, and Bosnia. In 1529 the Ottoman fleet under Salih Reis and Aydın Reis destroyed the Spanish fleet of Rodrigo Portundo near the Isle of Formentera. This was followed by the first conquest of Tunisia from Spain and the reconquest of Morea by the forces of Hayreddin Barbarossa, whose fleet later conquered the islands belonging to the Duchy of Naxos in 1537. Afterwards, the Ottoman fleet laid siege on the Venetian island of Corfu, and landed on the coasts of Calabria and Apulia, which forced the Republic of Venice and Habsburg Spain ruled by Charles V to ask the Pope to create a Holy League consisting of Spain, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Genoa, the Papal States and the Knights of Malta. The joint fleet was commanded by Charles V's leading admiral, Andrea Doria. The Holy League and the Ottoman fleet under the command of Hayreddin Barbarossa met in September 1538 at the Battle of Preveza, which is often considered the greatest Turkish naval victory in history. In 1543 the Ottoman fleet participated with French forces in the siege of Nice, which at the time was part of the Duchy of Savoy. Afterwards, Francis I of France enabled the Ottoman fleet to overwinter in the French harbor of Toulon. This unique Ottoman wintering in Toulon (sometimes inaccurately called an occupation; the Ottomans merely stayed the winter and did not impose any form of governance on the populace) allowed the Ottomans to attack Habsburg Spanish and Italian ports (enemies of France); they left Toulon in May 1544. Matrakçı Nasuh, a 16th-century Ottoman Janissary, polymath, and Swordsmanship, reportedly participated in the wintering in Toulon.
In 1541, 1544, 1552 and 1555, the Spanish-Italian fleet of Charles V under the command of Andrea Doria was defeated in Algiers, Naples, Ponza, and Piombino, respectively.
Between 1547 and 1548, Yemen was reconquered from the Portuguese, while in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, other important Portuguese ports such as Oman and Qatar were conquered in 1552,Peter Malcolm Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, Bernard Lewis The Cambridge history of Islam 1977. but the Ottomans failed to take Hormuz Island and therefore the control of the Persian Gulf remained firmly in Portuguese hands.
In 1565 the Aceh Sultanate in Sumatra (Indonesia) declared allegiance to the Ottoman Empire, and in 1569 the Ottoman fleet of Kurtoğlu Hızır Reis sailed to new ports such as Debal, Surat, Murud-Janjira and finally set foot on Aceh with a well-equipped fleet of 22 ships, which marked the easternmost Ottoman territorial expansion.
The Ottoman naval victory at the Battle of Preveza in 1538 and the Battle of Djerba in 1560 ensured the Ottoman supremacy in the Mediterranean Sea for several decades, until the Ottomans suffered their first ever military defeat at the hands of the Europeans at the Battle of Lepanto (1571). But the defeat at Lepanto, despite being much celebrated in Europe, was only a temporary setback: it could not reverse the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus, and within a year, the Ottomans built an equally large fleet, which in 1574 conquered Tunisia from Spain. This completed the Ottoman conquest of North Africa, following the operations of the Ottoman fleet under Turgut Reis which had earlier conquered Libya (1551); and of the fleet under Salih Reis which had conquered the coasts of Morocco beyond the Strait of Gibraltar in 1553.
In the years following their conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Turks had dominated the Mediterranean with their fleets of . In 1475, the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II employed 380 galleys under the command of Gedik Ahmet Pasha, whose fleet conquered the Greeks Principality of Theodoro together with the Genoese-administered port towns of Balaklava, Sudak, and Feodosiya ("Kefe" in Turkic languages.)Gábor Ágoston. Asia Minor and Beyond: The Ottomans. The Great Empires of Asia. Ed. Jim Masselos. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2010. p. 121 As a result of these conquests, starting from 1478, the Crimean Khanate became a vassal state and protectorate of the Ottoman Empire, which lasted until 1774.
The failure of the siege of Malta in 1565 and the victory of the Holy League navies over the Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 indicated that the pendulum was beginning to swing the other way, further shown in the Battle of Cape Celidonia, but the Black Sea was, for a time, regarded as a "Turkish Lake".Charles King, The Black Sea: a History, Oxford University Press, 2004 pp. 125, 131, 133–134 For over a hundred years Ottoman naval supremacy in the Black Sea rested on three pillars: the Ottoman Turks controlled the Turkish Straits and the mouth of the Danube; none of the states in the region could muster an effective naval force; and the virtual absence of piracy on the Black Sea. However, after the 1550s, it was the start of frequent naval raids by Zaporozhian Cossacks that marked a major change in control of the Black Sea. The Cossacks' keelless rowing boats, called chaikas, could accommodate up to seventy men and outfitted with , the boats made formidable sea vessels. They had the advantage over the Ottoman galleys in that being small, and low in the water, they were difficult to spot and highly manoeuvrable. In the early 1600s the Cossacks were able to assemble fleets of up to 300 such boats and send them to every corner of the Black Sea. They began attacking large towns such as Feodosiya, Varna, Trabzon, and even the suburbs of Istanbul. Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire, Gábor Ágoston, Bruce Alan Masters (eds.) Infobase Publishing, 2009 p. 450
Guillaume Levasseur de Beauplan, a French military engineer, provided a first-hand account of the Cossack operations and their tactics against the Turkish ships and towns on the Black Sea Coast. The high point of the Cossack attacks came in 1637, when a large party of Zaporozhian and Don Cossacks laid siege to the fortress of Azov. After a two-month land and sea battle, the fortress was conquered by the Cossacks.
The Ottoman Navy also engaged in blockades of Georgia's western coast during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to coerce local kingdoms into submission.
The 18th century was a period of stalemate for the Ottoman fleet, with numerous victories matched by equally numerous defeats. Important Ottoman naval victories in this period included the reconquest of Moldavia and Azov from the Russian Empire in 1711. The Ottoman–Venetian War of 1714–1718 saw the reconquest of Morea from the Venetians and the elimination of the last Venetian island strongholds in the Aegean.
For most of the 18th century, during a period of time in the eastern Mediterranean known by some as the Pax Ottomana, the focus of the Ottoman Navy was both on defining and defending its territorial waters from rival states and enforcing its authority over them as well as increasingly on protecting international trade routes and defending its maritime commerce from the constant problem of piracy.
However, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774, the Ottoman fleet was destroyed in the Battle of Chesme (1770). The next Russo-Turkish War (1787–1792) again saw numerous naval defeats at the hands of the Russian Black Sea Fleet under Admiral Fyodor Ushakov.
During the Greek War of Independence (1821–1829), the Greek rebel navy consisting of converted merchant ships originally challenged Ottoman naval supremacy in the Aegean, blockading Ottoman forts in the Morea and contributing to their capture by Greek land forces. Following the intervention of the Egypt Eyalet in 1824, the far superior Ottoman-Egyptian fleet under the command of Ibrahim Pasha gained the upper hand and successfully invaded Crete and the Morea until the arrival of the combined British Empire-French-Russian Empire fleets which destroyed most of the Ottoman-Egyptian naval force at the Battle of Navarino in 1827.
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| Note: Between 1699 and 1738 the Ottoman navy started to use more sailing ships who needed more crew on each ship instead of galleys with less men. | |||||||||
Nordenfelt-class Ottoman submarine (1886) was the first submarine in history to fire a torpedo while submerged under water. Two submarines of this class, Nordenfelt II (, 1886) and Nordenfelt III ( Abdül Mecid, 1887) were built for the Ottoman Navy. They were built in pieces by Des Vignes (Chertsey) and Vickers (Sheffield) in England, and assembled at the Taşkızak Naval Shipyard in Constantinople (Istanbul). These submarines were an attempt to gain an edge over the Greek navy (which had only one Nordenfelt submarine, a smaller and older version). However, it was quickly realized that – like the other Nordenfelt submarines ordered by Russia – they suffered from stability problems and were too easy to swamp on the surface. The Turks could not find a crew that was willing to serve on the primitive submarines. Abdül Hamid ended up rotting at dock, while Abdül Mecid was never fully completed.
In 1910, the Ottoman Navy purchased two pre-dreadnought battleships from Germany: and her sister ship . These ships were renamed and , respectively.
The Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912 and the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 proved disastrous for the Ottoman Empire. In the former, the Italians occupied Ottoman Tripolitania (present-day Libya) and the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea and the Regia Marina defeated Ottoman light naval forces in the battles of Preveza, Beirut and Kunfuda Bay. In the latter, a smaller Greek fleet successfully engaged with Ottoman battleships in the naval skirmishes of Elli and Lemnos. The better condition of the Greek fleet in the Aegean Sea during the Balkan Wars led to the liberation of all Ottoman-held Aegean islands other than those in the Italian-occupied Dodecanese. It also prevented Ottoman reinforcements and supplies to the land battles on the Balkan peninsula, where the Balkan League emerged victorious. The only Ottoman naval successes during the Balkan Wars were the raiding actions of the light cruiser under the command of Rauf Orbay.
In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, the Ottomans remained engaged in a dispute over the sovereignty of the North Aegean islands with Greece. A naval race ensued in 1913–1914, with the Ottoman Navy ordering large dreadnought like and with the aforementioned public donations made to the Ottoman Navy Foundation. Although the Ottoman government had fully completed the payments for both battleships and sent a Turkish delegation to the United Kingdom to collect them after the completion of their sea trials, the British government confiscated them at the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 and renamed them as and . This caused considerable ill-feeling towards Britain among the Ottoman public, and the German Empire took advantage of the situation when the battlecruiser and light cruiser arrived at the Dardanelles and entered service in the Ottoman Navy as and , respectively. These events significantly contributed to the Sublime Porte's decision to enter the First World War on the side of the Central Powers. However, Germany and the Ottomans had already signed a secret alliance, the Ottoman-German alliance on 2 August 1914, before the British naval seizures.
during the Battle of Gallipoli in World War I. Considered in the same league as the [[minelayer]] in terms of the role that she played in the naval engagements during the battle, ''Muâvenet-i Millîye'' strongly influenced the course of the conflicts by generating a [[domino effect]] which caused the failure of the Entente strategy.]]
In 1915 at the Battle of Gallipoli, the Royal Navy and French Navy fleets failed to pass through the Dardanelles ( Çanakkale Boğazı) thanks to the heavy Turkish fortifications lining the Strait, mining by Turkish minelayers like Nusret, and fierce fighting by the Turkish soldiers on land, sea and air.See Massey, Castles of Steel During the battle, the British submarine sank on 8 August 1915.
In the last year of World War I, while returning from a bombardment mission of the Allied port of Mudros on the Greek island of Lemnos, Midilli ran into a minefield between Lemnos and Gökçeada on 20 January 1918, and sank after being severely damaged by five consecutive mine hits. During the mission, Midilli, together with Yavuz Sultan Selim, had managed to sink the British warships and , as well as a 2,000-ton transport ship, and had bombarded the port of Mudros, together with the communication posts and air fields of the Entente on the other parts of Lemnos. The battlecruiser Yavuz Sultan Selim became one of the most active Ottoman warships throughout the First World War; she bombarded numerous ports on the Black Sea and Aegean Sea, while engaging with Russian dreadnought battleships of the and sinking a number of Russian and British warships and transport vessels.
Following the end of World War I, the victorious Entente dissolved the Ottoman Navy and the large ships of the Ottoman fleet were towed to the Prince Islands in the Sea of Marmara under the control of Allied warships, or locked inside the Golden Horn. Some of them were scrapped.
After the independence of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the remaining major warships of the former Ottoman fleet, such as the battlecruiser , the pre-dreadnought battleship TCG Turgut Reis, protected cruisers and , and , , and , and , , and were overhauled, repaired and modernized in the 1920s, while new ships and submarines were acquired starting from the early 1930s.
The Ottoman admiral and cartographer Piri Reis crafted maps and books of navigation, including his first world map (1513) which is one of the oldest surviving maps of Americas and possibly the oldest surviving map of Antarctica. The first world map (1513) and second world map (1528) of Piri Reis are today preserved at the Library of Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. Other works of Piri Reis are preserved at the Naval Museum in Istanbul.
The museum contains an important collection of military artifacts pertaining to the Ottoman Navy. In the maritime field, it is Turkey's largest museum, with a great variety of collections. Around 20,000 pieces are present in its collection, including the late 16th or early 17th century Ottoman Navy galley known as Tarihi Kadırga, built in the period between the reigns of Sultan Murad III (1574–1595) and Sultan Mehmed IV (1648–1687), as evidenced by AMS radiocarbon dating and Dendrochronology. She is the only surviving original galley in the world, and has the world's oldest continuously maintained wooden hull.
Being connected to the Turkish Naval Forces Command, it is also the country's first military museum.
In the early 21st century a new exhibition building was constructed. The construction began in 2008, and the building was reopened on October 4, 2013. It has two floors above ground level and one basement floor, all covering .
The basement consists of diverse items like , ornaments of naval ships, ship models, and pieces of the Byzantine Empire chain that was used for blocking the entrance of the Golden Horn during the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1453. In the first and second floors, a large number of imperial and other caïques are exhibited.
Many exhibition items underwent special restoration and conservation works due to deformation of the raw materials caused by heat, light, humidity, atmospheric conditions, vandalism and other factors.
== Gallery ==
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