Starting with the ninth century, Syrian maintained a significant presence at the monastery of St Mary in the Nitrian desert also known as Deir al-Surian, the Monastery of the Syrians. Since this community seems to have been continuously at Deir al-Surian for the best part of a millennium, if makes for a very peculiar example of mobility and settling from the end of late antiquity through high middle ages. Moreover, it is also, in many respects, a very well documented case, not least because there is epigraphic evidence still extant from the very beginning of the Syriac presence at the monastery. More importantly, from this monastery stems the largest part of the Syriac manuscripts known today – including the earliest Syriac manuscripts available – and they carry further information about the people involved in circulating and collecting books for the community. This papers seeks to systematise the available data about the presence of Syrians in the Nitrian desert and to discuss the relevance and limitations of such for thinking about ancient mobility and migration.

Dan Batovici is a senior researcher at the University of Vienna and works broadly on the reception of early Christianity, with a special interest in material culture. In particular, his current projects study how idealised images of early Christianity can be linked to the development of various types of literature in several late antique and medieval manuscript cultures.

The Mediterranean coasts’ port cities were connected by seabourne transport throughout (late) antiquity. Sailors, migrants, merchants, fishermen and other travellers self-identified as Christian, Jewish or followers of traditional polytheistic cults which we now call ‘pagan’, Roman, Hellenic, ‘Oriental’ etc. Yet all aimed to reach shore, and home, away or new homes again, through a watery network of sacred points, urban shrines, and shipboard rituals. These places and practices, their safe-seafaring significance, and their initiation by professional mariners or new migrants, first globalized and Hellenized but then Christianized the religion of port cities. How can we reconstruct the often-ephemeral practices of this changing maritime religion? Our literary sources are partial and biased, while archaeological evidence is either stacked up along the shore in a palimpsest of mosques, churches and temples, or sunken with ships. The example of sailing between Constantinople and Alexandria shows how some religious habits of mariners, merchants, and migrants shaped the (re)development of cults both pagan and Christian. The combined literary, epigraphic, architectural and shipboard votive practices of individuals could reveal how travel by sea spurred the development of new cults of safe-seafaring gods and then saints along the seaboard.

Amelia R. Brown is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and past Senior Lecturer in Greek History and Language at the UQ, Australia. She was Gertrude Smith Professor at the ASCSA in 2026 and 2024, and published Corinth in Late Antiquity: A Greek, Roman & Christian City (IBTauris/Bloomsbury 2018). She holds a PhD and MA in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology from UC Berkeley, and is working on books on ancient Greek seafaring religion, and portraits from Corinth.

In this paper I aim to offer a broad discussion of the twin poles of mobility and place in the study of past religion – from the macro-scale models of the spread of religious ideas offered by network analysis to the embodied experiences of people engaging in pilgrimage; and how place attachment and place-making forms an essential counterpoint to new directions in mobilities research. I’ll explore the intersections of the intangible and the material in research on past religion: both in terms of lived experiences, and the presencing of the spiritual. I am a firm believer in the importance of reattaching the more abstracted models we create to past people’s lived realities, social relationships, communities, and place. Foregrounding the social in our discussions of past mobilities and religious expression in archaeology encourages us to attend to these human qualities: emotional connections, places, materials and meanings, the stuff that makes past lives matter.

Anna Collar is Associate Professor of Archaeology at Southampton University.

Religious migration and mobility in the first millennium, a chronological framework more suited to understanding the topic at hand, often involved coercion and force. Monastics, who are a curious case because their virtue was supposed to be staying in one place, but their entire existence was based on movement in the form of withdrawal from society, were frequently subjected to this form of mobility. However, the nature of this displacement varied greatly. Some cases resulted from doctrinal strife, some from politics, and some from economic or even climatic change. This heterogeneity of reasons and approaches raises serious methodological and theoretical questions when studying these phenomena. From nuns fleeing the Lombard threat in Italy to Miaphysite monks hiding in houses in Amida, monastic displacement often involved ingenious solutions. This paper will investigate how we can trace, analyse and contextualise monastic displacement as a social phenomenon within the broader Mediterranean world. Starting with what constitutes displacement and how we can identify it in our sources, the paper will attempt to outline a way forward in understanding and comparing this phenomenon.

Mateusz Fafinski is a senior researcher at the University of Erfurt. His work concentrates on the history of the first millennium, especially monasticism, manuscript studies, and the evolution of urban space. His recent publications concern interactions between monasticism and cities, palaeography of medieval mortuary rolls, Jerome’s philosophy of history, and civil unrest in late antique cities.

…where we start from, and which histories and epistemologies we acknowledge, will profoundly shape our understandings (Bhambra 2021: x). The study of ancient migration tends to fall between two binary approaches: either one completely ignores modern mobility studies, aiming to present a purer emic approach, or one fully embraces a more analogic, sometimes etic approach, selecting key case studies from disciplines addressing the topic of migration and applying at will (Trinka 2025). While it might seem that one of these approaches is certainly better than the other, they both have significant issues as it pertains to one’s own positionality in relationship to translating these materials and, more specifically, these disciplines, whether one believes they (should or do) engage with them or not. After articulating the pitfalls that can be found in either of these polarized approaches, I argue that responsible analysis of mobility in the ancient past must be more dynamic and reflexive. For further methodological pizzaz, I use the imagery of specific types of dance, a different kind of thoughtful traveling movement that is intentionally “unscientific,” to assist in understanding these approaches. This paper ends with an invitation to a more collaborative, inter-/trans-disciplinary composition, a new dance that does not demand integration of different selves to make for a coherent, cohesive whole while still remaining open to transformation (Schinkel 2019).

Alexiana Fry is a research fellow at her alma mater, Stellenbosch University, with the faculty of Old and New Testament. Her specialties lie at the intersection of trauma theory, feminism, and migration/diaspora studies. She is the author of two books, as well as an editor for two volumes, the interdisciplinary journal Avar, and the forthcoming T&T Clark Handbook on Migration, Mobility, and the World of the Hebrew Bible.

This paper is a reflection on the methodological issues around comparative analysis that I sought to address in the research I contributed to the ERC-Funded project ANINAN (PI: Elisa Uusimäki, Aarhus University, 02/2021¬–01/2026). One implicit methodological question recurred across my ANINAN research: What is the place or role of gender, literary genre, and/or languages for establishing or delimiting comparative analyses in the study of ancient Jewish narratives? Important assumptions—both my own and held within the field of biblical studies—haunt this question. Both resistance to and encouragement for my work were often based upon assumptions about the purpose of comparison, the nature, function or transmission of texts, the circulation of knowledge, and the (im)permeability of cultural boundaries—as well as the perceived uniqueness of early Judaism and its literature. Addressing each assumption in turn, I articulate the utility of what I call “complex and horizontal comparisons”, with reference to examples from my ANINAN publications. To conclude, I will reflect on what I think my complex and horizontal comparisons have contributed to the study of early Judaism, and how they might be connected to the multidisciplinary study of mobility, migration, and religion.

Gillian Glass is a scholar of ancient fiction, with a particular focus on Second Temple Jewish literature and the ancient Greek novel. Major themes in her recent research are individual and communal identity, intercultural boundaries, and human-divine relationships. Gillian is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Ancient Studies at the University of Bergen (Norway), where she is embarking on a new project entitled, “Multi-modal, Multi-local, Multi-lingual: New Methods for Reading Ancient Jewish Novels between Textuality and Materiality” (a.k.a MULTI).

It has long been recognised that mobility contributed significantly to the success of the Christian movement in Rome. Yet Adolf von Harnack and subsequent scholarship have often treated mobility primarily as “travel”: an infrastructural precondition for the “mission and expansion” of Christianity, rather than as a constitutive element in the development of Christian communities, institutions, doctrines, and rituals. This paper asks how modern, nation-centred assumptions have shaped categories such as “travel,” “migration,” and the “migration period” and scholarly interpretations of mobility. It argues that the emergence of historical-critical scholarship amid the rise of nation-states and the consolidation of fixed political borders encouraged the projection of sedentary and territorially bounded social models onto the Roman world. As a result, cross-border movement has frequently been framed as external “invasion,” while mobility within the Empire has been reduced to the supposedly neutral category of domestic travel. By tracing these assumptions through the concepts of the “migration period” (Völkerwanderung) and Roman “travel,” the paper demonstrates how “methodological nationalism” obscure the role of mobility in the formation of Christianities in the city of Rome in Antiquity.

András Handl is Fellow at the Walter-Benjamin-Kolleg, Universität Bern, Switzerland. He currently works on religious aspects of migration and mobility in Late Antiquity. He is co-editor of a special issue of the Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum on migration, initiator of MigRel.Net, a research network on migration and religion in Antiquity.

The Mediterranean world remained connected long after the ‘fall’ of the western empire. People were constantly on the move between East and West, be it for trade, military service, to take up positions within the imperial administration, as ambassadors, as delegates at Church councils, in exile, for pilgrimage, or forcibly transported as slaves. Focusing on the evolving place of Greek in the West, one of the aims of my research is to reconstruct these political and religious networks between East and West, in order to understand how such population movements ensured the exchange of languages, texts, and ideas across the Mediterranean. Far from being a time of decline in knowledge and usage of Greek, the period of Christianity’s rise witnessed new reasons for westerners to learn Greek. This paper will address some of the fundamental methodological challenges in studying the place of language and Greek-Latin bilingualism in the context of migration and mobility across the late antique Mediterranean. In what ways did religious conflicts, geo-political upheavals, and new forms of Christian lifestyle such as asceticism and monasticism affect knowledge and use of Greek among westerners, and how can we best trace this in our sources? How can we fruitfully use prosopographical or network analysis to answer questions about language use and knowledge across the social spectrum?

Alison John is PI on the project GREEKWEST, funded by an ERC Starting Grant. Integrating textual and epigraphic evidence, the project aims to reconstruct the place of Greek in the sociolinguistic landscape of the late antique West. Before this, I was a postdoc at All Souls College in Oxford and at Ghent University. My first monograph was published earlier this year (Learning and Power in Late Antique Gaul, CUP), which examines the relationships between Roman education and structures of power in late antique Gaul.

How can migration be reconstructed when the sources through which it is studied were themselves shaped by confessional, political, and institutional agendas? This paper examines the mobility of the Syriac Orthodox Church between Upper Mesopotamia and northern Syria from the late ninth to the eleventh century, with particular attention to the methodological challenges posed by the evidence. Rather than treating migration as a sudden exodus or as the straightforward consequence of religious persecution, it combines Syriac narrative sources with patriarchal consecration lists, epigraphic evidence, manuscript evidence, and Byzantine seals to reconstruct gradual shifts in ecclesiastical geography.
This approach reveals a progressive movement of patriarchal activity from Mesopotamia towards the Aleppo–Antioch region and, subsequently, Melitene, closely connected to changing Abbasid and Byzantine political configurations. At the same time, reading the sources against their retrospective confessional narratives complicates the assumption of a linear history of separation between Miaphysites and Chalcedonians. Local patronage, economic interests, frontier conditions, and shifting political alliances emerge as important factors in explaining mobility and settlement. The paper therefore proposes an approach to migration that integrates spatial, institutional, and material evidence, while treating silences and retrospective narratives as historical evidence in their own right.

Marianna Mazzola is Associate Professor at Sapienza University of Rome. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of the medieval Christian Orient, with particular emphasis on Syriac Christianity and its relations with Islam and Byzantium. She is currently directing an ERC project on the transformation and adaptation of episcopal leadership during the transition from the Byzantine and Sasanian to the Islamic period.

Since Gerd Althoff’s pioneering work on the Reisekönigtum, early medieval society is increasingly viewed as fundamentally dependent on mobility. Both short- and long-distance travel were existential necessities across social strata, with elite movement driving commoner migration. Within this, Italy emerged as a primary transit point and destination, catalyzed by the Papacy and its post-774 integration into the Carolingian domain. While pilgrimages, military expeditions, and diplomatic missions drove transalpine crossings, ordinary mobility—such as unofficial resettlements governed by personal and professional motives—was equally common. Particularly revealing is the mid-ninth-century migration of domestic chaplains from Germany and Gaul to Italy. These “private” priests served kings and aristocrats, relocating alongside their patrons. However, their movement faced strict legal regulation. Above all, they required an official license to travel. Unlicensed clerics heavily concerned secular and ecclesiastical authorities, who feared the spread of doctrinal errors, inutiles quaestiones, or the moral degradation of wandering from village to village luxuriendo vel fornicando, which could compromise the dignity of the entire priestly order.

Annamaria Pazienza is a historian specializing in the socio-economic, political, and ecclesiastical history of Lombard and Carolingian Italy, with a primary focus on historical human mobility and migration. Her interdisciplinary research integrates written sources, archaeology, and material culture, and has been supported by prestigious European institutions, including a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship and the DFG. She has held academic positions and fellowships at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the University of Padova, the University of Nevada, Reno, and the University of Tübingen, producing numerous publications in leading medieval studies journals alongside a forthcoming monograph with Brill.

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Jan Rüggemeier is professor for New Testament at the Protestant Theological Faculty, Bonn University.
Caroline Teschmer is professor for Religious Education at the Protestant Theological Faculty, Bonn University.

Methodological presentism – the tendency in scholarship and society to interpret social phenomena through a narrow contemporary lens, overlooking the effects, connections, and distinctions shaped by human history- continues to shape much of migration research. Challenging this bias is essential to a fuller understanding of migration: it enables us to trace how present-day patterns have evolved over time and to recognize both continuities and change.

Furthermore, how can we, as researchers, work in (genealogical/longue durée) ways that combine empirical examples with theoretical insights and concepts to enlighten our understanding of both the past and the present? In this talk, I will first draw on my research on Danish migration history, grounded in a critique of methodological presentism and what I learned from it. How did I use history and a genealogical reading of sources to understand both the past and present? In my talk, I will also consider whether influential concepts in ethnographic and social-science research on migration, such as superdiversity, can also advance the study of migration in the past.

Garbi Schmidt is professor for Cultural Encounters at Roskilde University at the University of Bamberg.

Starting from the end of the fourth century into the sixth, several monks turned from Egypt towards Gaza and the wider Palestinian environment. Initially the flight was linked to the Origenist controversy and to the monophysite sympathies in Palestine, but later the monastic environment itself might have acted as a catalyst, attracting further newcomers. Among those who relocated to Palestine was Abba Isaiah, who became a recluse while maintaining contact with the outside world through Peter the Iberian. An echo to this type of arrangement emerges also in the case of Barsanuphius, a native of Egypt, who settled in the monastery established by Seridus near Thabatha. From there, Barsanuphius kept an extensive correspondence with his disciples together with John the Prophet, who – like Peter the Iberian in the case of Abba Isaiah – mediated his interactions with the outside world. Against this background, this paper will examine other examples of migration towards Palestine, and will also evaluate the reliability of the sources, and the methodological difficulties involved in determining whether individual movements to Palestine could be understood in terms of seeking refuge, pilgrimage, or simply attraction to the vibrant monastic environment. Moreover, contrasting attitudes towards relocation or movement can also be discerned, with some sources regarding these practices as incompatible with the tranquillity, considered essential to monastic life.

Madalina Toca is a FWF Elise Richter postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vienna, working on fifth and sixth century monastic epistolography and its reception.

Elisa Uusimäki: How to Write Travel History in Light of Ancient Literary Sources?