The Itinerarium Burdigalense – also known as the Itinerarium Hierosolymitanum – is the oldest known Christian itinerarium. It was written by the "Pilgrim of Bordeaux", an anonymous pilgrim from Burdigala. 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.
Interpretation and analysis
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia: Another reader, Jaś Elsner, notes that, a brief twenty-one years after Constantine legalized Christianity, "the Holy Land to which the pilgrim went had to be entirely reinvented in those years, since its main siteancient Jerusalemhad 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 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 and a stopover place, and the differences between the simplest cluster of habitations and the fortress or city. 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" Jerusalem. Glenn Bowmanengaged in a close textual analysis of the Itinerarium; he 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.
Manuscripts
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.
Similar itineraries
A well-known pilgrim itinerary of the sixth century, written by someone from Placentia/Piacenza, is attributed incorrectly to "Antoninus of Piacenza".
