Is there a sense of "caravanserai" which includes an elaborate transportation - such as of a circus?

Question

The OED lists only one non-metaphorical sense of the word caravanserai - (from caravan - etymology Persian).

A kind of inn in Eastern countries where caravans put up, being a large quadrangular building with a spacious court in the middle.

This is endorsed by Wikipedia which provides much the same meaning.

However I have most often heard caravanserai used to describe a motley transportantion on a number of vehicles - such as of a circus moving from one place to the next. Of course a caravan was originally: A company of merchants, pilgrims, or others, in the East or northern Africa, travelling together for the sake of security, esp. through the desert. So the notion of transportation was inherent to the word's beginnings. Hence I am puzzled by the idea of caravanserai being a fixed building or settlement.

Consider the following use - which accords entirely with the way I have most often heard the word used in Britain- from Six Wives: the Queens of Henry VIII by David Starkey (London 2003) p.230.

It was in any case a day of upheaval at Court as it was the beginning of the Progress. The whole courtly apparatus of 'portable magnificence' - the tapestries and cushions, jewels and plate, household utensils and the King's own clothes, bedding and travelling library, medicine chest and personal petty-cash - had been packed into their special bags, boxes and chests and loaded on to carts. The carts had been covered with bear hides to protect them against the elements and the great caravanserai of the Court stood ready to depart from Greenwich to the first port of call of the Progress: Waltham Abbey in Essex.

This seems to refer, as I would have expected, to the travelling body rather than to anything fixed.

Answer 1

I tried to find a time period in which caravanserai expanded in meaning from a structure (palace, hotel, inn, place where caravans were loaded, corral, etc.) to travelling people (or people and their paraphernalia, sometimes including their vehicles) who resembled a caravanserai in some figurative way.

After this first pause at Jerusalem, the caravanserai got under way again and set out on a long journey through all the scenes of the Old Testament, the storied deserts and ruins of Syria, not much less ancient to the view and much less articulate than now. This was in the year 387, two years after their departure from Rome. Margaret Oliphant; The Makers of Modern Rome (1895)

This early mention of a travelling caravanserai is a curious: a stationary "caravanserai" that moves: a "travelling hotel":

An ocean trip to-day is usually a very conventional affair. Travelling hotels—which the big liners boastfully claim to be—do not lend themselves to the spirit of a romance supposed to be attached to Old Ocean.
Diligent search will, however, reveal a certain amount of genuine romance even on a travelling caravanserai. In order to find the romance, a process of elimination must be resorted to. W. B. Northrop; "Life on a Liner: The Romance and Realism of an Ocean Voyage" (1903)

No wonder that when ladies went on a visit in those days they went on "a round of them." The roads must have shown a lively aspect under one of these perambulations. A country call must have assumed the proportions of a travelling caravanserai. W. O. Tristram; Moated Houses (1910)

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I believe the OP's great caravanserai of the Court is more likely this figurative use of caravanserai than the literal one. All the other 19^th-century examples and definitions I found referred to something stationary.

I, too, was more familiar with the figurative meaning of something moving. Just a speculation: could it be that some authors incorrectly assumed that caravan was a shortened form of caravanserai and that a caravanserai could therefore travel?

There are nice entries for caravan and caravanserai in J. McClintock and J. Strong; Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature (1880)

It's curious that, as Edwin A. points out in comments, only a few dictionaries like Lexico (and I'll add the New Oxford American Dictionary) have a a separate meaning for "A group of people travelling together; a caravan," while the OED (last modified online in 2019) does not. The OED's three current citations for the transferred/figurative meaning are all places, even though one is a "mind" that can, obviously, move about.

UPDATE

The Sept. 2021 OED update added this sense for caravanserai:

2. A group of people travelling together; a caravan (CARAVAN n. 1).

1836 Wilson's Hist. Tales Borders II. 230/1 On the third day, the caravansary reached the promised land.