Hossein Ali Beg Bayat was a Safavid diplomat from the Turkoman Bayat clan, who served as the ambassador to the Holy Roman Empire, the Russian Tsardom, Habsburg Spain and several other royal and noble courts during the reign of king Abbas I, and was part of the first Safavid embassy to Europe.

The Persian embassy to Europe (1599–1602) was dispatched by the Persian Shah Abbas I in 1599 to obtain an alliance against the Ottoman Empire. The Persians had then been at war with the Ottoman Empire for more than a century, and so decided to try to obtain European help against the Ottomans. Besides the territorial antagonism of the Ottoman and Persian realms, there was also strong religious antagonism, as the Persians proclaimed Shiism against the Ottoman Empire's Sunnism. The objective of the mission was to establish a European–Persian alliance against the Ottoman Turks. These Persian efforts at rapprochement with Europe followed the Persian defeat against the Ottoman Empire in the Ottoman–Safavid War (1578–1590).