Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem
The travel notes of a Christian who went overland from Bordeaux to Jerusalem and back in 333. Mostly a list of stages and distances, it includes the oldest surviving description of the holy places by a pilgrim, made while Constantine’s churches were new.
Read the text at archive.org ↗The passage on Golgotha and Constantine’s basilica (pp. 23–24 of the translation), in the same volume ↗
The author is unknown. The text is a road-book: it lists the halts and changes of horses from Bordeaux across northern Italy, the Balkans and Asia Minor to Palestine, and back by way of Rome and Milan. It dates itself by the consuls of the year: the journey from Chalcedon and back to Constantinople was made, it says, in the consulship of Dalmatius and Zenophilus, which is 333.
Only in Palestine does the list broaden into description. At Jerusalem the pilgrim notes the pools, the Temple mount, Sion, the hill of Golgotha, the tomb a stone’s throw from it, and the basilica that had been built there by order of Constantine. This is an eyewitness two years before the dedication recorded in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre Is Dedicated. The pilgrim reports what was shown and what local guides said about each place, and does not mention Helena or a relic of the cross.
Cited in
- AD 335, firm date