Louise Firouz, who died Sunday at 74, rediscovered the diminutive Caspian Horse in the steppes of northern Iran and managed to establish herds abroad as revolution swept the nation.

In a life with shades of Isak Dinesen and Cinderella, Firouz grew up in Virginia horse country, married a Persian prince, and settled in the late 1950s in Shiraz. There she lived in regal splendor. Having studied veterinary medicine and ridden in show-jumping competitions, she decided to open a children’s equestrian center in Tehran.

In search of suitable mounts for smaller riders, she followed rumors to some remote villages just south of the Caspian. In 1965, Firouz spotted what proved to be the first of a new breed. It was covered with ticks and pulling a cart. Over the next few years, she found about 50 more of them in the region, and with sponsorship of the shah created a breeding program. She became convinced that the Caspians were living descendents of small horses depicted in the seals of Persian kings and in friezes at Persepolis, the opulent capital of Darius the Great, who ruled Persia between 522 and 486. Caspians closely resembled scaled-down versions of Arabs: big bulging eyes, prominent jaws, and high-set tails. There was speculation that they were the forebears of some of today’s most coveted horses. Genetic testing has established that the two breeds are closely related, but not that the Caspian is ancestral, according to a clinical professor at the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Science and an expert on horse genetics, Gus Cothran.

As Iran spiraled toward revolution, Firouz’s herd was taken over by the state. She managed to get several out of the country in the form of a gift to Britain’s Prince Philip in 1976, plus a few more that became the foundation of a European herd. Her national herd was auctioned to tribesmen who used the horses for meat and for pack animals.

During Iran’s revolution in 1978, Firouz and her husband were arrested. Firouz was released after a few weeks following a hunger strike. Her husband was released after three months, but the dynastic fortune had vanished. Firouz sold her jewels and silver to survive during the difficult years of the Iran-Iraq war. She later began another herd, and by 1992 listed 38 Caspians in the International Caspian Stud Book. She resumed exporting the horses in small numbers. Today there are Caspian herds in America, Canada, New Zealand, and England, among others. The numbers abroad are said to exceed the population of Caspians still in Iran.

Louise Laylin was born December 24, 1933, and grew up in Great Falls, Va., where she learned show jumping on her family farm. She was studying veterinary medicine at Cornell University when she broke her back while jumping. She continued her education in a body cast. She subsequently studied for a year in Beirut, and while on a side trip to Tehran she met Narcy Firouz, an aristocrat of the royal Qajar dynasty. He proposed, and she moved to Iran to be with him in 1957.

“Everyone went through Shiraz in those days,” she remembered. “We never had lunch for less than 30.” Frequent guests included Arthur Upham Pope, a pioneer Persian art historian, and Kermit Roosevelt Jr., mastermind of the CIA’s overthrow of Iran’s government in 1953.

While the luxuries of her old life disappeared with the revolution, Firouz seemed hardly to miss them. While not sympathizing with successive revolutionary governments who harried her breeding efforts, she also found American foreign policy overly muscular. “I think America has lost direction of what it is supposed to be doing,” she told the Christian Science Monitor in 2003. “It’s beginning to look a bit like the last days of Rome.”

In recent years, as Iran opened a bit more to tourists and word of the Caspian horse spread, her breeding farm west of Tehran became a place of pilgrimage for horse fanciers. She also ran pack-horse treks for foreigners.

Despite her physician’s advice, “I’m not too old to ride,” she told Reuters in 2007. “I’m too old to fall off.”

Her husband died in 1994; two daughters and a son survive her.