The Wittelsbach-class battleships were a group of five pre-dreadnought battleships built for the German Kaiserliche Marine in the early 1900s. They were the first battleships ordered under the Second Navy Law of 1898, part of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz's fleet expansion program. The class comprised the lead ship, Wittelsbach, and Wettin, Zähringen, Schwaben, and Mecklenburg. All five ships were laid down between 1899 and 1900 and were finished by 1904. The ships of the Wittelsbach class were similar in appearance to their predecessors in the Kaiser Friedrich III class, but had a more extensive armor belt and a flush main deck, as opposed to the lower quarterdeck of the previous class. Both classes carried a battery of four 24 cm (9.4 in) guns in two twin-gun turrets.

Pre-dreadnought battleships were sea-going battleships built from the mid- to late- 1880s to the early 1900s. Their designs were conceived before the appearance of HMS Dreadnought in 1906 and their classification as "pre-dreadnought" is retrospectively applied. In their day, they were simply known as "battleships" or else more rank-specific terms such as "first-class battleship" and so forth. The pre-dreadnought battleships were the pre-eminent warships of their time and replaced the ironclad battleships of the 1870s and 1880s.