The Middle Ages formerly known as the Dark Ages:

«At the Council of Chalcedon, held in Byzantium in 451, there was an attempt to force monks to live in monasteries and quit wandering, but this had little long-lasting effect.9 For one thing it was practically very difficult to police individual piety. And for another, global cultural networks in the early Middle Ages were already wide and strong enough [emphasis mine] to mean that men and women were living monastic lives far beyond the discipline of Constantinople: by the fifth century Christian hermits could already be found as far afield as Ireland and Persia. Wherever there was Christianity, there were monks and hermits, and for a long time there seemed to be very little way to impose any sort of order or discipline on their spontaneous, vigorous, and localized subcultures.»

Powers and Thrones (Dan Jones) https://bookshop.org/ebooks/quotes/2b5fd5b7-0a08-4a45-9054-9bec407de262