Bordeaux Itinerary documents a 333–334 CE pilgrimage

The Bordeaux pilgrim wrote in a plain register: stations, distances, holy sites. The Itinerarium Burdigalense covers a 333–334 CE journey from Burdigala (Bordeaux) across Gaul and Italy, along the Via Appia to Brundisium, across the Adriatic to Dyrrhachium, and by the Via Egnatia and beyond to Jerusalem. The list confirms that the empire’s arteries still pulsed centuries after Appius’ first stones [17].

On the page, Arles, Milan, and Rome appear as stepping stones; Aricia, Forum Appii, and Capua return like old friends; Brundisium, Dyrrhachium, and Thessalonica mark the handoff to the East. The pilgrim names mansiones and mutationes, the fabric of official travel now carrying private devotion. The sound of the narrative is the measured rhythm of miles; the color is the alternation of provincial tones—Gaul’s limestone, Latium’s basalt, Macedonia’s marbles—under the same Latin numerals [8][17].

The Itinerary sits atop systems. Milestones on the Appia and Domitia affirmed counts; Digest remedies still protected access; curatores and contractors still had budgets and duties; and the schematic tradition represented by the Tabula Peutingeriana offered a diagrammatic imagination of these routes. He walked, rode, and sailed inside an infrastructure of stone and law designed long before he set out [7][9][12].

Three places anchor his passage. Rome, where relics and martyrs’ memories now shared the city with the Golden Milestone; Brundisium, the old hinge to Dyrrhachium; and Jerusalem, where the Roman way met the sacred. He turned an administrative service into an itinerary of faith, yet the service holds: mansiones spaced, mutationes ready, stages predictable [3][17].

His text proves that the network mattered as much to the devout as to the imperial—roads were not just for legions and letters but for prayer. The empire’s nervous system carried different signals now, but the axons were the same.