The Itinerarium Burdigalense ("the Bordeaux itinerary", also known as the Itinerarium Hierosolymitanum, "the Jerusalem inventory") is the oldest known Christian itinerarium, written by an anonymous pilgrim from Burdigala (present-day Bordeaux).[1] It tells of the writer's journey to the Holy Land in 333 - 334,[2] by land through northern Italy and the Danube valley to Constantinople, then through Asia Minor and Syria to Jerusalem, and then back by way of Macedonia, Otranto, Rome, and Milan. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia:
The report of his journey outside Palestine is little more than a dry enumeration of the cities through which he passed, and of the places where he stopped or changed horses, with their respective distances. For the Holy Land he also briefly notes the important events which he believes to be connected with the various places. In this he falls into some strange blunders, as when, for instance, he places the Transfiguration on Mount Olivet. Such errors, however, are also found in subsequent writers. His description of Jerusalem, though short, contains information of great value for the topography of the city.
Another reader, Jaś Elsner, notes that, a brief twenty-one years after Constantine legalised Christianity, "the Holy Land to which the pilgrim went had to be entirely reinvented in those years, since its main site— ancient Jerusalem— had been sacked under the Emperor Hadrian and refounded as Aelia Capitolina". Elsner found to his surprise "how swiftly a Christian author was willing implicitly to re-arrange and redefine deeply entrenched institutional norms, while none the less writing on an entirely traditional model," the established Greco-Roman genres of travel writing.[3]
The compiler of the itinerary was aware at each boundary of crossing from one Roman province to the next, and distinguished carefully between each change of horses (mutatio) and a stopover place (mansio), and the differences between the simplest cluster of habitations (vicus) and the fortress (castellum) or city (civitas). The segments of the journey are summarised; they are delineated by major cities, with major summaries at Rome and Milan, long-established centers of culture and administration, and Constantinople, refounded by Constantine only three years previously, and the "non-city"[4] Jerusalem.
Glenn Bowman engaged in a close textual analysis of the Itinerarium and argues that in fact it is a carefully structured work relating profoundly to Old and New Biblical dispensations via the medium of water and baptism imagery.[5]
The Itinerarium survives in four manuscripts, all written between the 8th and 10th centuries. Two give only the Judean portion of the trip, which is fullest in topographical glosses on the sites, in a range of landscape detail missing from the other sections, and Christian legend.[6]
A well-known pilgrim itinerary of the sixth century, written by someone from Placentia/Piacenza, is attributed incorrectly to "Antoninus of Piacenza".
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed (1913). Catholic Encyclopedia. Robert Appleton Company.