Intrepid early medieval men and women carried to Europe the coins, relics, and things yet to be discovered. What was it like to travel? This is really two questions: the experiential one, which is best answered in anecdotal fashion, and the analytical one which seeks broader, sometimes latent patterns over space and time. Taken individually, an Amalarius' travels or the Mediterranean coins lost in the Rhine are striking but isolated anecdotes. Whether they are exceptions or the rule is the crucial historical question which has gone unanswered. Viewed against the backdrop of hundreds of other movements, their paradigmatic significance becomes unmistakable. It is time to capitalize on this new evidence for the light it throws on the universe of communications in the nascent Mediterranean economy. For that is what the evidence reveals. Thanks to the hundreds of individual and small group movements that have been uncovered and are described in Parts II and III, it is now possible to pose basic questions about the structure and dynamics of long-distance communications in the early Middle Ages. The sheer volume and diversity of the new evidence guarantee the value of those questions, and enhances the interest of their answers. Ineluctably this will draw us to the broader economic shifts incarnate in these very movements.

The questions can be articulated in their temporal and spatial dimensions, which are interlocked. Chapters 14, 15, and 16 address time and timing in Mediterranean communications. Seasonality and seasonal rhythms figure prominently here, alongside speed.