"... through them [the disciples of Gregory of Sinai] their master’s writings and oral teaching spread through the monasteries and royal courts of Eastern Europe. Byzantium, Bulgaria, Serbia, Rumania and Russia were all affected by this new cosmopolitan movement: monks, churchmen, writers and artists, travelling from country to country – ‘wandering for the sake of the Lord’, as a fourteenth-century writer put it – found themselves in a similar spiritual and cultural environment; and through this ‘Hesychast International’, whose influence extended far beyond the ecclesiastical sphere, the different parts of the Byzantine Commonwealth were, during the last hundred years of its existence, linked to each other and to its centre perhaps more closely than ever before."