TheItinerarium Burdigalense: Politics and Salvation in the Geography of Constantine's Empire

Abstract

The shift from a traditional polytheistic dispensation for empire to a Christian-oriented ‘commonwealth’ is unarguably one of the most significant historical processes that took place in the Roman world. Its ramifications were manifold, and not least in the arena of how empire and its territory would come to be conceived within Late Roman and Byzantine culture. In this paper I want to explore the ways one text, written in the lifetime of Constantine, takes a series of traditional forms within the established genres of Graeco-Roman travel-writing and transforms them into a new Christian paradigm not only of travel (in the form of Christian pilgrimage) but also of empire as a territorial concept defined by particular privileged places and their privileged mythologies. The surprise lies, in part, in 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 text I shall be exploring, theItinerarium Burdigalense(henceforth IB), is an account of a journey to the Holy Land made by an anonymous pilgrim from Bordeaux in A.D. 333.