[2] Mirza Salman had received his education in administration at Shiraz under the guidance of his father, who then served as the vizier of the city's governor, Ebrahim Khan Zu'l-Qadar.

Ismail II's 19 years of imprisonment in the Qahqaheh Castle had affected him heavily, and thus he was not inclined to allow displays of authority by any other individual at his own cost, which made him alienate Pari Khan Khanum and the Qizilbash.

[7] In order to clear up the succession crisis, the Qizilbash chieftains agreed to appoint the future shah after a conference with each other and then notify Pari Khan Khanum of their settled choice.

At first, they discussed the resolution that Shoja al-Din Mohammad Safavi, the eight-month-old infant son of Ismail II, should be crowned as shah while in reality state affairs would be taken care of by Pari Khan Khanum.

This was further manifested in 1581, when he acted as a principal architect of a critical diplomatic arrangement, wherein the Georgian rulers—Simon I of Kartli and Alexander II of Kakheti—resumed their allegiance to the shah, undermining the Ottoman position in this part of the Caucasus region.

[11] On May 12, 1583, the Qizilbash chieftains sent assassins after Mirza Salman, who had left for the nearby village of Gazorgah, where he arranged a feast in memory of his forebear, Khvajeh Abdollah Ansari.

He was, however, informed of the Qizilbash plot to murder him, and speedily went back to Herat, where he found refuge in a madreseh, which had been used as royal accommodation by Mohammad Khodabanda and Hamzeh Mirza.

Mirza Salman was a prominent and influential statesman of his age, which gained him the title of E'temad-e daulat ("Pillar of the State"), and made historians compare him to Asif ibn Barkhiya, who was the vizier of Solomon in the Quran.