The Tro Breiz, the pilgrimage of the seven founding saints

Seven saints, seven sees

Samson at Dol, Malo at Alet then Saint-Malo, Brieuc at Saint-Brieuc, Tugdual at Tréguier, Paul Aurelian at Saint-Pol-de-Léon, Corentin at Quimper, Patern at Vannes: seven bishops whom Brittany regards as its founders, and seven cathedrals that the pilgrim of the Tro Breiz — the “tour of Brittany”, circuitus Britanniae in Latin — links in a loop of five to six hundred kilometres. The list is no accident: it corresponds exactly to the map of the former ecclesiastical province of Dol, the one that the Bretons, from the middle of the 9th century, sought to set against the metropolitan see of Tours. Rennes and Nantes, Gallo-Frankish cities, are not part of it; that is why the tour has seven stages and not nine, although the Brittany of the Ancien Régime had nine bishoprics. The oldest manuscript to name the seven together, a 13th-century Latin codex, numbers them in the margin of a Life of Saint Ronan, from Brieuc to Tugdual, without mentioning any pilgrimage.