Divided in numerous States with area and population inevitably reduced, Crete has experienced all possible forms of mobility, from and towards the exterior of the island, as well as between its own cities, in groups more or less important, as well as by individuals or families. Here it will be dealt only on mass movements.

As first perceptible examples can be considered the undertakings of colonisation by continental Greeks, which result in foundation of cities, like Polyrrhenia or Lyttos. Later there are the moving of groups, which leave a city to settle elsewhere in the island, like these people from Itanos, that appear in Lyttos, or these citizens of Hierapytna, settled probably close to the Cretan Arcadians, who want to maintain ties with their metropolis with a treaty, or also these inhabitants of Lato, who descend to the sea and found in Kamara a port installation with its own governing body, but conserve their original nationality.

These internal moving have probably inspired Plato to imagine the common founding by all the Cretan States of the ideal city of the Magnetes in Crete, whereas for the real Magnesia on the Meander was invented the fiction of a colonization made by the Cretan Koinon.

The frequent wars between these small States, cramped for space in their territories, should have caused forced moving of population, in particular when the defeated city was destroyed by its adversary. Especially documented is the deportation after the conquest and destruction of Lyttos by Cnossos (219 BC): if women and children were in a first time led in the victorious city, the surviving population was afterwards generously received by the city of Lappa, and the men continued, by the side of their guests, the war against Cnossos; however Lyttos righted itself, since it was very active as late as in the third century AD.