Medieval court panegyrics were recycled between patrons and still mislead historians today

Evidence

As in other fields of propaganda, the same material could be re-used. A poem in praise of one ruler could, with slight necessary adjustments, be resold to another. There are many stories in the literary histories of poets moving from the service of one prince to that of another, and sometimes recycling the same poems. The tenth-century Syrian prince Sayf al-Dawla had a staff of poets who, in a sense, are still working for him at the present day, and have misled some insufficiently wary historians into accepting the propaganda line. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 467

Categorization

• QUESTION: How many modern historians of, e.g., Sayf al-Dawla or the Fatimids still take court-panegyric claims at face value, and how would one detect a recycled poem?
• XREF: Directly relevant to Orientalist/epistemological reading: medieval Muslim sources — poems themselves — are propaganda artifacts that later scholars (including Western ones) mistake for neutral evidence. Bears on the cluster’s interest in how ‘the region became legible.’