Shirley travelled to Persia in 1598, accompanying his brother, Anthony, who had been sent to
Safavid Iran from 1 December 1599 to May 1600, with 5000 horses to train the army according to the rules and customs of the English
militia and to reform and retrain the
artillery. When Anthony Shirley left, Robert remained with fourteen other Englishmen. There, in February 1607, he married an
Eastern Orthodox Christian woman,
Sampsonia, a
Circassian slave related to the emperor. After being baptized into the
Catholic Church by the Carmelites, she adopted the name Teresa for
Teresa of Ávila, founder of the order, in addition to her own name. She became known in the west by the name
Lady Shirley, Teresa Sampsonia. In 1608, Emperor
Abbas the Great sent Robert on a
diplomatic mission to
James VI and I, the
king of the three states of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and to other European princes for the purpose of uniting them in an alliance against the
Ottoman Empire. From his very first mission in Persia, the modernisation of the army by Robert and his men proved to be highly successful; the Safavids scored their first crushing victory over the Ottomans in the
Ottoman–Safavid War (1603–1612), ending it on highly favourable terms. in 1611, Sala dei Corazzieri,
Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome. Painted in 1615–1616 Shirley travelled first to the
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, where he was received by
Sigismund III Vasa. In June of that year, he arrived in Germany, where he was granted the title of
count palatine and appointed a Knight of the
Holy Roman Empire by
Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor.
Pope Paul V also conferred upon him the title of
count. From Germany, Sir Robert travelled to
Florence and then Rome, where he entered the city on Sunday, 27 September 1609, attended by a suite of eighteen persons. He next visited
Milan and then proceeded to
Genoa, from which he embarked for
Habsburg Spain, arriving in
Barcelona in December 1609. He sent for his wife, and they remained in Spain, principally at
Madrid, until the summer of 1611. , painted in Rome in 1622 In 1613, Shirley returned to Persia. In 1615, he returned to Europe and resided at Madrid. In a pleasingly serendipitous meeting, Shirley's caravan encountered
Thomas Coryate, the eccentric traveller and travel writer and attendant of
Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales's court in London, in the
Central Persian desert basins in 1615. Shirley's third journey to the Safavid Empire was undertaken in 1627, when he accompanied
Dodmore Cotton, the first English ambassador to the Safavids. He died soon after arrival of
dysentery in
Qazvin (now northwest
Iran). After being initially buried there, his remains were later moved from Qazvin to
Rome in 1658 by his wife Teresia following her retirement to a
convent of the
Carmelites in the same city attached to
Santa Maria della Scala. She died there in 1668. ==In art==