The political authority of the Abbasid caliphs diminished over the course of the ninth and tenth centuries. In Iran, this led to the establishment of several independent Iranian dynasties, ousting of Arabs from their scattered bastions across the country, and an Iranian cultural renaissance. The period between the collapse of Abbasid authority and the conquest of Iran by the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century is referred to as the "Iranian Intermezzo".