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.