Iranian Courts and the Tenth and Eleventh century Mobile Elite

It is generally understood that the intellectuals of the Islamic world often traveled. At the very least they went to Mecca for pilgrimage. Often they traveled to other major cities in search of teachers, information, or employment. For much of the Abbasid period, the assumption is that the major destination of intellectuals who wanted to be in government service was Baghdad. However, in the tenth and eleventh century, the number of administrative capitals and thus royal courts proliferated. Other cities, including Iranian cities, began to compete with Baghdad for administrative and cultural personnel. The diversification of administrative centers meant that the phenomenon of the mobile elite was accelerated and exacerbated by the presence of multiple courts which provided larger opportunities for patronage and at the same time by a series of crises that displaced both elites and non-elites alike.
The Buyid centers of Shiraz, Rayy, and Kirman, as well as other Iranian cities hosted large numbers of elites in the eleventh century and served as part of a network of cities that played host to large numbers of traveling intellectuals. This is clear when one looks at the accounts of Iranians from these Buyid centers, such as Mu’ayyad fi al-Din al-Shirazi and Nasir-I Khusraw, who traveled elsewhere in the Islamic Middle East. When one takes a closer look at biographical dictionaries, it becomes clear that those travelers who wrote autobiographies were simply the tip of the iceberg and that there was a traveling class of Iranians who spread far and wide and served in places like Aleppo, Cairo, and as far away as Andalusia.
A brief examination of these quite traditional historical sources establishes the connections between the Iranian Buyid Capitols and other intellectual centers of the time. What becomes clear is that while Baghdad is still an important intellectual center, it was no longer the primary destination for those who sought a court post. Other cities were just as important and many intellectuals traveled without seeking to reach Baghdad. They also left Baghdad for greener pastures in Iranian Buyid capitols.
Finally, an examination of sources that are less often exploited by historians such as religious texts and poetry shows that not only did Iranian Buyid courts become intellectual destinations, they developed independent court cultures that differed markedly from Baghdad, as well as from other newcomers such as the cities of Khurasan.