Perhaps even more so than in preceding periods, art was an instrument of dynastic expression in this great age of empires. Spurred by royal patronage, the arts flourished under the Ottomans and Safavids. Ottoman military incursions into Iran in the later fifteenth century, and throughout the sixteenth century, led to the appropriation of artists, works of art, and artistic ideas. Ottoman decorative arts and the arts of the book were thereby enriched by the repertoire of floral and vegetal motifs first developed in fifteenth-century Iran, generally referred to as the international Timurid style.