Diplomats and pilgrims are the best-attested western travelers in the early medieval Mediterranean. One of Charlemagne's ambassadors and two western pilgrims have left accounts of their trips to the east. A papal envoy who wrote no such narrative has nonetheless made enough tracks that we can reconstruct his story. Half a century separates the ambassadors and nearly thrice that divides the pilgrims. As their stories will show, the intervening generations were anything but devoid of developments in Mediterranean communications.

Jerusalem pilgrims

St. Willibald is almost emblematic of the Carolingian ecclesiastical revival. An Anglo-Saxon immigrant, he collaborated closely with St. Boniface and served the new German bishopric of Eichstätt with distinction (741–87). In the evening of his life, the great prelate dictated the story of his youthful travels to a nun. Hugeburc was his relative who had herself recently immigrated from England. The detail and style of narration suggest that Willibald had kept some kind of written record of his trip. Errors are mostly phonetic distortions of proper names (e.g. “Strobrolis” for Strobilos in Asia Minor) or arise out of Hugeburc's strange stew of shaky grammar and bombastic style. Once one gets past that, it is clear that the nun worked hard to recount accurately her kinsman's story.

Willibald had been entrusted to a local abbot at a tender age. When he was twenty, he set out from his Hampshire home for Rome.