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Travel Sickness 197
tained writing survives from antiquity on the problems of keeping
a field army healthy. Thus, when Adam of Cremona wrote a
Regimen iter agentium vel peregrinantium to guide the Emperor
Frederick II as he prepared to set off on his (as it turned out)
disastrous expedition to the Holy Land in 1227, he had to turn
to Arabic sources in translation. 69 His is indeed one of the
earliest Latin works to make extensive use of the Canon of
Avicenna (Ibn Sina). He does not seem to have had access to
the Latin version of Rhazes’s military advice. And what he
borrowed from Avicenna was almost always the standard stuff
of individual regimen: the health needs and problems of men en
masse hardly occurred to him. As a church cantor writing for
crusaders, he wanted to include spiritual advice too. This would
have been a new departure in regimen, though one based on the
inclusion of appropriate emotions among the ‘non-natural’ determinants
of health. But Adam more or less forgot his religious
task in the composition; the result is far more conventional than
he intended.
A genuinely new departure was achieved by the next writer in
this uneven sequence, the great Spanish physician Arnald of
Villanova. His Regimen castra sequentium or Regimen Almarie
belongs here because it is a free-standing treatise, albeit a very
short one. 70 It is full of sensible, non-generic, advice, not all of it
medical: ‘When the army must move from one place to another,
infantry shod with heavy-soled shoes should precede it by a
mile or two, who will search in and around the route to see
whether iron caltrops have been sown or scattered there . . . And
so that the army may be preserved from epidemic, let pits be
dug everywhere outside its lines, like trenches, where animal
waste and bodies can be thrown; and when they are half full
69 Ed. F. Hönger, Ärztliche Verhaltungsmassregeln auf dem Heerzug ins
Heilige Land für Kaiser Friedrich II. geschrieben von Adam v. Cremona
(ca.1227) (Leipzig, 1913). For context see T. C. van Cleve, The Emperor
Frederick II of Hohenstaufen: Immutator Mundi (Oxford, 1972), 316–17; M. R.
McVaugh, ‘Medical Knowledge at the Time of Frederick II’, Micrologus 2
(1994), 12–13; McVaugh, ‘Arnald of Villanova’s Regimen Almarie (Regimen
castra sequentium) and Medieval Military Medicine’, Viator 23 (1992),
201–13, at 204–5.
70 Ibid. and Arnaldi de Villanova Opera Medica Omnia, ed. McVaugh,
10.2. The quotation following is from para. 2.