The tenth century witnessed not only the recovery of Crete for the Byzantine Empire and for the Christian faith, but also the spread of monasteries over Greece. When Nikon had concluded his Cretan mission he visited Athens, where he is said by his biographer to have enchanted the people with his sermons, penetrated as far as Thebes, and then returned to Sparta, where he founded a convent and established his headquarters. Thence he set out on missionary journeys among the Slavonic tribes of the Melings and Ezerits, who had again risen against the Imperial authority and had again been reduced to the payment of a tribute. Those wild clans continued, however, to harry the surrounding country, and the monastery of St Nikon was only protected from their attacks by the awe which the holy man’s memory inspired. Long after his death he was adored as the guardian of Sparta, where his memory is still green, and the Peloponnesian mariner, caught in a storm off Cape Matapan, would pray to him, as his ancestors had prayed to Castor and Pollux. For Central Greece the career of the blessed Luke the younger was as important as that of St Nikon for the South. The parents of this remarkable man had fled from Ægina, when the Cretan corsairs plundered that island, and had taken refuge in Macedonia, where Luke was born. Filled with the idea that he had a call to a holy life, the young Luke settled as a hermit on a lonely Greek mountain by the sea-shore, where for seven long years he devoted himself to prayer. A Bulgarian raid drove him to the Peloponnese, where for ten years more he served as the attendant of another hermit, who, like the famous Stylites of old, lived on a pillar near Patras. After further adventures, he migrated to Stiris, between Delphi and Livadia, where the monastery which bears his name now stands.