In 751, in a battle near Samarqand on the frontier between the 'Abbasid caliphate and the Chinese T'ang dynasty, Muslim forces defeated the Chinese army. The Battle of Talas ended the westward expansion of the T'ang dynasty into Transoxiana; afterwards, Muslim powers ruled the region for centuries. While the Battle of Talas was geopolitically significant, it is most commonly associated with a legend that this battle caused the knowledge of paper-making technology to spread from China into the Islamic world. According to this story, 'Abbasid forces captured Chinese papermakers after the battle, thereby winning paper-making technology for Islamic civilization. The problem: almost no one thinks this story is true. The evidence is fairly convincing: paper was attested in Transoxiana before the Battle of Talas; no contemporary Arabic sources mention the captured papermakers; and Chinese and Central Asian papermakers were not even using the same materials to make paper in the eighth century. Rather, the story of the captured papermakers seems to originate in eleventh and twelfth-century Arabic sources, during the period when Turkic peoples rose to power and dominance in the central lands of the Islamic world. This paper analyzes the development of the myth of the Battle of Talas and the spread of papermaking technology. By examining how medieval authors, such as al-Tha'alibi (d. 1038), Ibn al-Athir (d. 1160), and al-Dhahabi (d. 1348) incorporated the legend of captured papermaking into stories of the Battle of Talas, I argue that this legend served as significant rhetorical purpose: the story of the battle and the transfer of technology from 'the East' became popular during the same period when Turkic peoples began to dominate the ruling structures of the Middle East. While the Seljuks, a Turkic tribe from Central Asia, began emigrating into the Middle East in the eighth century, they conquered Baghdad and the 'Abbasid caliph in the eleventh century. By circulating stories of advanced technology acquired from Central Asia, historians rhetorically argued for the power and significance of the Central Asian frontier.