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Pilgrim of Bordeaux


The Itinerarium Burdigalense ("Bordeaux Itinerary") — also known as the Itinerarium Hierosolymitanum ("Jerusalem Itinerary") — is the oldest known Christian itinerarium. It was written by the "Pilgrim of Bordeaux", an anonymous pilgrim from Burdigala (present-day Bordeaux, France). It recounts the writer's journey to the Holy Land in the years 333 and 334 as he traveled 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 institutionalized 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 [i.e., the established Greco-Roman genre of travel writing]."


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