Medieval court poets still shape how historians read their patrons today

Evidence

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

• SEED: An essay angle: the historian-as-propagation-victim — how propaganda outlives its patrons by centuries through the archives themselves. Every historian working from primary sources must contend with intentional spin baked into the record.
• DEEPTHINKING: The core epistemic trap of history — sources are propaganda that outlive their agents — packs a dense, hard-to-summarize point about how interpretation is always already distorted by the propagandists of the past.