More than hundred years ago in 1918 the eighth largest navy of the world, the Austro-Hungarian Navy ceased to exist. Fifty years ago the notable naval historian Paul G. Halpern wrote these lines: "Even among historians mention of the Austro-Hungarian navy is apt to provoke smiles amid images of Ruritanian situation complete with elaborately bemedaled officers bearing grandiose titles, a bathtub fleet and in general a comic opera atmosphere." Reading this it could be easily imagined the Grand Admiral of the Fleet entering the court ball his chest fully covered with medals and ribbons towing a toy battleship on castors, while in the remote harbor a handful of sailors polish the antiquated guns of the navy's half dozen tiny warships. Although the mention of the Austro-Hungarian Navy provokes similar images for many even today, the reality, especially in the 20^th century was totally different.

Fifty years passed, and after a series of excellent books and articles written in English, German and other languages on the Austro-Hungarian Navy, the situation is nearly the same. The Navy disappeared along with the Habsburg Empire in 1918 without a successor, and the largest nations of the former Dual Monarchy (Austrians, Hungarians and Czechs) have been cut off from the sea. In these countries without real maritime traditions not surprisingly the memory of the Navy rapidly faded. While in the last two decades the history of the Austro-Hungarian Navy received growing attention, still only small groups of enthusiasts keep alive its memory in the successor states of the Monarchy. The broad public has little knowledge about the actual existence of the Navy, and the picture of a comic opera fleet is deeply rooted in the minds. The fact that the Navy in the years immediately preceding the First World War became a serious factor in the Mediterranean, and the fleet was in this period the much developed branch of the Habsburg armed forces it's a surprise even for some historians.

In the time of my childhood in the seventies there were only a few signs in Hungary that the Austro-Hungarian Navy actually existed. At the Museum of Military History at Budapest only the model of the battleship Szent lstván represented the Navy. Originally this model was a Viribus Unitis converted to Szent lstván by simply removing two from her four screws. The most popular and widespread sources of knowledge about the Navy were the fictional maritime adventure books of András Dékány written in the 1950s and 1960s. Dékány used the Navy as an interesting element of the historical background of his stories, and his picture of the Navy was incoherent and sometimes incorrect. In the Socialist regime the person of the last Flottenkommandant of the Navy, Miklós Horthy the later Regent of Hungary was also a discouraging factor for the objective research. The change began in the 1980s primarily thanks to the works of Károly Csonkaréti.

Beside the official memorabilia there were naturally some personal relics. On my father's desk was lying a little brass anchor on a nice wooden stand with the engraving Világháborús emlék 1914–1918 (memory from World War). Now it is in our glass-door cabinet beside my grandfather's brass telescope and my wife's chinaware. This anchor was bought by my great-grandmother Katica's brother Nándor who served in Cattaro during the war. It is also a nice example of the developed Austro-Hungarian wartime souvenir industry. I saw its twin in the Serbian Orthodox Church of Szeged, a tiny silver (or silver plated brass) anchor hanging on a chain on the altar screen, the votive offering of Ferenc Pintér survivor of the Szent lstván. I saw the original relics of the former Austro-Hungarian battleships for the first time in 1991 in Venice. On either sides of the entrance of the Museo Storico Navale of Venice stands an anchor, one belonged to the battleship Viribus Unitis the other to the Tegetthoff.

The Austro-Hungarian Navy during the few years prior to the First World War transformed from a mere coastal defense force into a powerful war machine and a Mediterranean power, thanks to its new true battleships. These battleships, the mixed-caliber battleships of the Radetzky class, the dreadnoughts of the Tegetthoff class and the projected dreadnoughts of the "lmproved Tegetthoff" class often called the Ersatz Monarch class made the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy a sea power and an important factor in the Mediterranean. The history of the design process of these battleships is more important and interesting than at the first look it may seems, because aside the technical information it perfectly reflects the changing naval policy of Austria-Hungary.

If we accept the theory that the historian's text is a literary artifact, this book is a novel, a novel of building a cathedral. The topic of this novel is the building of the steel cathedral of Austro-Hungarian sea power, the Empire's battleship fleet. In that time during the great naval arms race preceding the First World War the cathedrals of sea power were the battleship fleets, which were in addition very important attributes of great power status. The Austro-Hungarian cathedral suffered a sad fate after 1918: it was demolished, its carvings were destroyed and its stones were carried away and on its former site grow now only weeds and oblivion.

This work is based upon the unpublished documents found in the Kriegsarchiv in Vienna in the first place. Documents related to the design process of the battleships are either in the files of the Präsidialkanzlei and of the II Geschäftsgruppe of the Marinesektion. The documents of political and financial questions are exclusively in the files of the former, while the documents of the battleship construction are exclusively in the files of the latter. The second most important source of documents is the Mladiáta-collection in the Magyar Műszaki és Közlekedési Múzeum Archívuma (Archives of the Hungarian Technical and Transport Museum) in Budapest. János Mladiáta served as a naval architect (Schiffbauingenieur) in the Austro-Hungarian Navy between 1903 and 1918. He had later an important role in reorganizing the Hungarian Danube Flotilla. He was an avid collector and during his long career collected thousands of plans and documents. His collection contains important documents on the battleship design and on naval guns and gun turrets. Mladiáta preserved such documents which are today missing from the files of the Kriegsarchiv. A notable example is the protocol of the underwater explosion test to evaluate the torpedo protection system of the 24,500 ton battleships in 1914. There are important documents on the wartime career of the battleships in the Hadtörténelmi Levéltár (Archives of Military History) in Budapest. These are official copies of original files of the Kriegsarchiv made in the early 1920s on the initiative of Károly Lucich, who commanded the Donauflottille in 1914–1917. The Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (Hungarian National Archives) contains a few documents on the Danubius shipyard and the battleship Szent István. Unfortunately, the majority of the documents fall victim of culling in the 1950s. In the files of the National Archives of the United States there are two American reports on the fire control of the Austro-Hungarian battleships which are the most valuable sources of the fire control system.

Battleships and their history were always popular topics, the Austro-Hungarian ones are no exceptions, especially the dreadnoughts of the Tegetthoff class. Thanks to this popularity many articles and other works were published over the last hundred years on them. By the very nature of the things the majority of these works are popular and semi-scholarly and there are only a few works based on extensive archival research. Of them all, stands out Christoph Ramoser's excellent book K. u. k. Schlachtschiffe in der Adria on the Tegetthoff class. Friedrich Prasky's book Die Tegetthof -Klasse and the articles of Erwin F. Sieche provide also valuable information on the Austro-Hungarian battleships and battleship designs. Among more general works on the history of the Austro-Hungarian Navy the most important are Paul G. Halpern's two books, The Mediterranean Naval Situation, 1908–1914 and Anton Haus, Österreich-Ungarns Großadmiral and Lawrence Sondhaus's The Naval Policy of Austria-Hungary, 1867–1918. Very helpful are Walter Wagner's Die obersten Behörden die k. u. k. Kriegsmarine, 1856–1918 and Antonio Schmidt-Brentano's three volume Die österreichischen Admirale, 1808–1924. The first is a detailed study of the history of the naval administration, the latter is an abundant source of information on all the Austrian and Austro-Hungarian admirals. Of the handful unpublished Austrian dissertations the most useful are Leo Reiter's Die Entwicklung der k. u. k. Flotte und die Delegationen des Reichsrates and Erich Krenslehner's Die k. u. k. Kriegsmarine als wirtschaftliche Faktor, 1874–1914. Reiter deals with the Navy's budget battles in the Austrian Delegation, Krenslehner provides an account of the close link between the economy and the naval expansion. The latter is the topic of the unpublished American dissertation written by Louis A. Gebhardt Jr. The Development of the Austro-Hungarian Navy 1897–1914. A Study in the Operation of Dualism.

Despite the Kingdom of Hungary being a part of the Dual Monarchy, the last wartime Flottenkommandant of the Navy was the Hungarian Miklós Horthy, the Hungarian historiography has not shown much interest for the history of the Austro-Hungarian Navy. It was true also for the 1920s and the 1930s when the political climate was favorable for such researches. The most important work which was published in this period was Olaf Wulff's semi-official history of the Donauflottille in the World War. After 1945, especially after 1948 the new regime viewed Horthy as a "supervillain" and the history of the Navy became a taboo for three decades. Károly Csonkaréti, an amateur historian began to publish semi-scholar and popular books and articles on the Austro-Hungarian Navy in the 1980s. His works played an important role in catching the attention of the Hungarian public and in encouraging others to research the history of the Empire's navy. In the early 2000s there appeared a new generation of scholars and amateur researchers. Among their works are the most important Tamás Balogh's and Oszkár Csepregi's A Szent lstván csatahajó és a csatahajók története and András Margitay-Becht's A Leitha monitor ...és a többiek. The first of these richly illustrated books deals with the history of the battleship Szent István and with the Hungarian diving expeditions to her wreck. The latter deals with the history of one the first pair of Austro-Hungarian river monitors, the Leitha which today serves as a museum ship in Budapest. I have to mention also my book A császári és királyi haditengerészet és Magyarország, which deals with the pro-navy turn of the Hungarian political elite and the development of the Hungarian naval industry prior the World War I.

This book is a somewhat shortened and reworked English version of my book published in 2018 on the last Austro-Hungarian battleship classes Az Osztrák–Magyar Monarchia csatahajói 1904–1914. I have omitted some chapters of the Hungarian book which were written specially for the Hungarian public not well-informed on naval matters. On the other hand this English version incorporates the results of my researches made since the publication of the Hungarian version. Most of these new additions are found in the chapters on the wartime career of the battleships and on their armament.

Finally, some notes on geographical names, ranks and units. Being a book on a historical topic I prefer to use the pre-1918 official geographical names with some exemptions (like Vienna, Rome, etc.). It is more convenient as these versions of geographical names are found in the contemporary official documents. It is true that many of these names were changed during the past hundred years some of them not only once, today in the age of internet and smartphones it can be found the new names within seconds. In the case of the naval ranks, especially of the Austro-Hungarians I chose to follow the method of some notable American naval historians to use the original form of these ranks (in German). At the end of the book a summary of the Austro-Hungarian naval ranks can be found in the appendix. A summary of the Austro-Hungarian deck designations can also be found in the appendix. As the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy adopted the metric system, the Empire's Navy used the metric units with some notable exemptions like nautical mile or knot. In this book I use the units that the Navy used, for example, "tons" as used by the Navy were metric tons (1,000 kg). One of the most important data of the battleships, normal displacement (Konstruktions-Wasserverdrangung), in the Austro-Hungarian Navy was calculated with 50% fuel, 50% ammunition and 50% reserve feedwater which differed from the methods used by other sea powers.