Some 200 foreign relics, over 100 documentary mentions of mancosi, more than 500 Arab coins and 250 Byzantine coins have expanded, dramatically, the evidence which bears on the great question of Mediterranean communications at the origins of Europe. In their circumstances of preservation and origin, they are mostly independent of the 669 travelers whom we got to know in Part II. Close scrutiny of five different sets of things has yielded five patterns over time and space. They overlap in a number of important ways, and we can no longer entertain the idea that those convergences result from some strange coincidence of source preservation. They stem from the medieval reality to which each series of witnesses independently testifies.

The oldest and largest set of relics from Sens allowed us to glimpse the currents that conveyed holy objects, or at least knowledge of shrines, across the Mediterranean toward north central France. In the Merovingian age, these currents linked to Gaul ports of Asia Minor, Africa, and the Levant. In the eighth century, most Byzantine ports vanish: only Constantinople and Ephesus remain. At Chelles, eighth-century communications with Byzantium look similar, though with special accents that may reflect special links between the Frankish and Byzantine dynasties. But the most striking element is certainly the role of the Caliphate in suggesting or supplying cults to both Sens and Chelles in an era when historians reckon communications with the Middle East to have been at rock bottom.