Sir Robert Sherley

…Sir Anthony and Sir Robert Sherley—the former an adventurer, the latter a loyal servant of the Shah who distinguished himself in the wars against the Ottomans. The reign of Shah ʿAbbās was a period of intense commercial and diplomatic activity, and, in the Persian Gulf, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and…

…XIII (1604) and the adventuring Sherley brothers from Elizabethan England. Just as his visitors hoped to use him to their own advantage, ʿAbbās hoped to use them to his, as sources of firearms and military technology, or as pawns in his economic warfare against the Ottomans, in which he was…

…advice of the English adventurer Robert Sherley. Sherley was versed in artillery tactics and, accompanied by a party of cannon founders, reached Qazvin with his brother Anthony in 1598. The bureaucracy, too, was carefully reorganized, but the seeds of the sovereignty’s weakness lay in the royal house itself, which lacked…