French battleship Charlemagne

Charlemagne at anchor
History
France
Name	Charlemagne
Namesake	Charlemagne
Ordered	30 September 1893
Builder	Arsenal de Brest
Laid down	2 August 1894
Launched	17 October 1895
Completed	12 September 1897
Commissioned	12 September 1899
Decommissioned	1 November 1917
Stricken	21 June 1920
Fate	Sold for scrap, 1923
General characteristics
Class and type	Charlemagne-class battleship
Displacement	11,415 t (11,235 long tons) (normal load)
Length	117.7 m (386 ft 2 in)
Beam	20.3 m (66 ft 7 in)
Draught	8.4 m (27 ft 7 in)
Installed power	20 Belleville boilers 14,200 PS (10,400 kW)
Propulsion	3 shafts, 3 triple-expansion steam engines
Speed	18 knots (33 km/h; 21 mph)
Range	4,000 miles (3,480 nmi) at 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph)
Complement	692
Armament	2 × twin 305 mm (12 in) guns 10 × single 138.6 mm (5.46 in) guns 8 × single 100 mm (3.9 in) guns 20 × single 47 mm (1.9 in) guns 4 × 450 mm (17.7 in) torpedo tubes
Armour	Belt: 110–400 mm (4.3–15.7 in) Decks: 70 mm (2.8 in) Barbettes: 270 mm (10.6 in) Turrets: 320 mm (12.6 in)

Charlemagne was a predreadnought battleship built for the French Navy in the mid-1890s, the name ship of her class. Completed in 1899, she spent the bulk of her career in the Mediterranean Sea. The battleship was initially assigned to the Northern Squadron (Escadre du Nord), but was not transferred to the Mediterranean Squadron (Escadre de la Méditerranée) until 1900. Twice the ship participated in the occupation of the port of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, then owned by the Ottoman Empire, once as part of a French expedition and another as part of an international squadron. Charlemagne and her sister ships rejoined the Northern Squadron in 1909 and the obsolete battleship became a gunnery training ship in 1913.

When World War I began in August 1914, she escorted Allied troop convoys in the Mediterranean for the first three months. Charlemagne was ordered to the Dardanelles in November to guard against a sortie into the Mediterranean by the ex-German Ottoman battlecruiser Yavuz Sultan Selim. In 1915, she joined British ships in bombarding Ottoman fortifications. The ship was transferred later that year to the squadron assigned to prevent any interference by the Greeks with Allied operations on the Salonica front. Charlemagne briefly served as a flagship before she was converted into a depot ship in mid-1917 and was partially disarmed later that year. The ship was stricken from the naval register in 1918. Charlemagne was condemned in 1920 and later sold for scrap in 1923.