Aprosopographical approach to the problem of early medieval communications yields a rich harvest of people on the move. We can see 669 travelers all told, who sought to travel around the Mediterranean in an era when movements there are thought to have been few and far between. The 669 individual stories allow us to discern, with varying precision in time and space, some 400 movements around the Mediterranean basin, over 80 percent of which covered more than 500 km (see Chapter 14). These trips laid the foundation for new knowledge of the patterns of shipping and communications at the origins of the European economy.

The first, irrefutable conclusion is that the evidence about early medieval shipping and communications is dramatically larger, and richer, than has ever been realized. This implies that we may dare to ask new questions: not simply whether such communications occurred, but when, where, and why they occurred. Even more important, we can pursue the first anecdotal indications of hitherto unnoticed changes in the volume, direction and routes by which communications flowed. Right away, the role of the Arab world appears surprising.

The second conclusion is that, socially speaking, this large amount of evidence is unevenly distributed. Types of travelers who stemmed from the social elite dominate the written record. Aristocrats tended to be ambassadors, pilgrims, and missionaries, and it is they who prevail in the surviving records. The social filter of early medieval literature is fully confirmed and its contours are better delineated.