Certain key themes, subjects and texts were considered to constitute a crucial educational foundation for an individual aspiring to achieve success in the court societies of the Persian Cosmopolis. This chapter argues that the character of this general education was deliberately ‘cosmopolitan’: based on a widely agreed canon of texts, both literary and scientific, whose importance was recognised across the Persian Cosmopolis. Rather than mere knowledge acquisition, the aim of this education was the formation of a specific type of disposition: a particular orientation towards the court society and towards the self. Underlying the external traits of this courtly disposition was a widely shared medico-philosophical understanding of the connections between mind, body and soul and the way in which the perfection of one, presupposed the engagement of the others. The implication of the body in the acquisition of knowledge and the perfection of the soul provides the rationale for directing attention to bodily practices and the influences of objects on bodies, a theme that recurs throughout this book.

The political and geographical peculiarities of the medieval Deccan meant that trade, together with military and revenue-collection duties, formed a crucial component of both the financial resources and the administrative responsibilities of the courtly elite. In this chapter, through an examination of the biographies of three individuals who combined trade and statecraft, and an analysis of the mercantile language in the cultural products of the Deccani courts, I discuss how these strikingly mercantile aspects of courtly society demonstrate that as an ethic, courtliness had both a practical, mundane aspect as well as an internal, spiritual aspect.