It is time to meet a second set of people on the move. They were born, raised, and made their careers in sibling cultures that differed deeply from Charlemagne's western Europe. But they too ventured across the great inland sea, to the other end of Christendom. In fact they knew some of the westerners we have already encountered.

Systematic scrutiny has turned up even more easterners who traveled across the Mediterranean world in the eighth and ninth centuries. They range from a Byzantine jester at the court of the Lombard kings to a deposed patriarch. Among the easterners too, a few faces stand out in the large but shadowy group of travelers whose traces we can still detect. These six men are known mostly through sources whose survival owes nothing to the circumstances which have preserved records of the western travelers: the light they cast on our problem is practically independent of what we have seen so far.

We begin with a bishop, born in a cattle town in Asia Minor, but accustomed to life in the capital, a staunch iconophile who enjoyed the confidence of pope and patriarch. This Michael was one of the few men who knew both Charlemagne and Harun al Rashid. Next come two of the most original men to issue from Byzantium, soldier's sons from Thessalonica. Constantine (Cyril) and Methodius followed the imperial command and their own instincts west. As missionaries, they blurred the borders between official and religious travelers.