Persian embassy to Europe
Years: 1609 - 1615
The Persian embassy to Europe (1609–1615), led by the Englishman Robert Shirley, is dispatched by the Persian Shah Abbas I in 1609 to obtain an alliance with Europe against the Ottoman Empire.
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The Persian embassy will go to Krakow, Prague, Florence, Rome, Madrid, London, and return to Persia through the Great Mughal's India.
Shirley is extremely well received in these countries, which are in regular conflict with the Ottoman Empire.
The reception in Krakow is excellent, ...
...as also in Prague, where Shirley is knighted.
He is also made a Count Palatine of the Holy Roman Empire by Rudolf II in 1609.
The shah had set great store on an alliance with Spain, the chief opponent of the Ottomans in Europe.
Abbas had offered trading rights and the chance to preach Christianity in Iran in return for help against the Ottomans, but the stumbling block remains Hormuz, a port that had fallen into Spanish hands when the King of Spain inherited the throne of Portugal in 1580.
The Spanish had demanded Abbas break off relations with the English East India Company before they would consider relinquishing the town.
Abbas was unable to comply.
Eventually Abbas becomes frustrated with Spain, as he does with the Holy Roman Empire, which wants him to make his one hundred and seventy thousand Armenian subjects swear allegiance to the Pope but had not troubled to inform the shah when the Emperor Rudolf in 1606 signed a peace treaty with the Ottomans.
Contacts with the Pope, Poland and Moscow are no more fruitful.
Robert Shirley is dispatched in 1609 at the head of a new embassy.
These Persian efforts at rapprochement with Catholic Europe (the Habsburg Empire, Italy and Spain), are an attempt to counterbalance the Franco-Ottoman alliance (between France and the Ottoman Empire), and come at a time when Persia is in direct conflict against the Ottoman Empire in the Ottoman–Safavid War.
The Persian embassy, continuing under the leadership of the English adventurer Robert Shirley, continues from Prague to Florence, ...
...Milan, and ...
...Rome, where Shirley is received by Pope Paul V; he continues on to Spain.
Sir Robert Shirley, still in the employ of the Persian shah, in 1611 reaches England but he is opposed by the Levant Company, which has strong interests with Turkey.
The English adventurer Robert Shirley, concluding a long diplomatic mission to Europe on behalf of the Shah, returns to Persia by sea, through the Cape of Good Hope to land in India, at the mouth of the Indus, escaping from an attempt to his life by the Portuguese.
He finally arrives at Isfahan with his Circassian wife Teresia in 1615.
All his traveling companions have however died on the way in a poisoning conspiracy.
"{Readers} take infinitely more pleasure in knowing the variety of incidents that are contained in them, without ever thinking of imitating them, believing the imitation not only difficult, but impossible: as if heaven, the sun, the elements, and men should have changed the order of their motions and power, from what they were anciently"
― Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (1517)