9780141997292

Europe and the Roma A HISTORY OF FASCINATION AND FEAR

‘A magisterial contribution to the understanding of the cultural position of Romani people … astounding’ LITERARY REVIEW

Klaus-Michael Bogdal

EUROPE AND THE ROMA

‘Politically startling and intellectually electric’ Steffen Richter, Der Tagesspiegel

‘This profound study has the potential to become a standard work’ Edelgard Abenstein, Deutschlandfunk Kultur

‘Klaus-Michael Bogdal’s book is indispensable for an understanding of the present situation of the Roma and Europe and its background. One hopes that it will find its way into history classrooms and on to the desks of politicians – because, as Bogdal so fittingly says, European culture has not lost its capacity for stripping itself of its civilization’ Cia Rinne, Die Tageszeitung

‘A highly sophisticated study, entirely free of sensationalism and often thrilling, which can’t help concluding with a warning for our times’ Uwe Ebbinghaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

‘One of the most important works on the origins and presence of prejudices in our time’ Amnesty Journal

‘A

book to be recommended!’ Andrea Härle, Romano Centro

‘A comprehensive survey that has been missing for a long time, and which is unimprovable’ Erhard Taverna, Schweizerische Ärztezeitung

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Klaus-Michael Bogdal is Professor of German Literature at the University of Bielefeld and has held visiting positions at Brown, Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Duke and Amherst, at numerous European universities, and in Latin America, Asia and Africa. He won the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding for the original German edition of Europe and the Roma . He was a member of the Independent Commission on Antigypsyism of the German Bundestag and the Federal Government (2019–2021) and is currently Senior Adviser to the research group Antigypsyism and Ambivalence in Europe (1850–1950).

Klaus- Michael Bogdal

Europe and the Roma

A History of Fascination and Fear

Translated by Jefferson Chase

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First published in Germany by Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2011 First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2023

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Translation copyright © Jefferson Chase, 2023

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Translator’s Note

The term Roma has been used to describe real-life individuals and the group as a whole, whereas Sinti designates the German-speaking subset thereof. The derogatory term ‘Gypsies’ has only been employed to reflect the stereotypes of and attitudes about that group as it was popularly imagined. For the sake of readability, except on first mention, this book will not place the term within quotes.

Prologue

The idea of writing a history of European discrimination against the Roma, or ‘Gypsies’ as they are also pejoratively known, came more or less through accident. In the excitement and turmoil of the collapse of the socialist system and fall of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s, having studied issues of Self and Other in literature for many years, I was called upon at a conference to present a couple of theses, popular in the humanities at the time, to explain the sudden increase of xenophobic violence in reunited Germany. Many people feared the country could be returning to a past they thought had been overcome. The 1992 arson attacks on homes for largely Vietnamese asylum seekers in the city of Rostock had been of a scope and character that led the chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Ignaz Bubis, to compare them –  not without reason –  to the Night of Broken Glass pogroms of 9–10 November 1938. As I researched what had happened in Rostock, I stumbled across statements made by a sixteen-year-old high-school girl who had actively participated in the violence and been subsequently asked –  almost as a reward –  to do an interview. ‘If Gypsies had been burned to death, it wouldn’t have bothered me,’ she said. ‘Vietnamese yes, but Sinti and Roma . . . unimportant.’1 The contemptuous anger and lack of empathy in the word ‘unimportant’ stuck in my mind. This young perpetrator justi ed her desire to kill fellow human beings by hierarchizing the victims. While she looked down upon all foreigners as vastly inferior to herself, ‘Gypsies’ were completely denigrated as ‘scum’ beyond the bounds of humanity itself.2

Looking back on the history of the Roma in the 600 years they have been present in Europe, I am constantly struck by the fact that the majority populace was as little bothered by their persecution and destruction as the self-proclaimed upstanding citizens of Rostock were by the idea that Gypsies could have been burned to death when young rioters tried to torch homes for asylum seekers. Where did such hatred for people who are so utterly unknown come from? At the time of the

Rostock violence, Germans ocked to amenco lessons, and musicians like the Gipsy Kings enjoyed smash hits around the globe. It’s entirely possible that this group’s lively, upbeat songs might have been playing at festive barbeques in Rostock while the act of arson was being committed, without any of the celebrants noticing the contradiction. My research didn’t yield any easy explanation –  either in the form of sociological and psychological theories about foreignness or knee-jerk analogies with anti-Semitism –  for such a combination of fascination and hatred. Without reconstructing the story of the relationship between Romani peoples since the formers’ immigration to Europe in the fourteenth and fteenth centuries, without shedding light on the shadow side of Europe’s development toward modernity, all my explanations were condemned to fail –  a fact that became all the more apparent as acts of anti-Roma violence followed in Romania, Italy, France, Hungary, Slovakia and Kosovo. It was apparent how incomplete, imprecise and biased my knowledge of Romani history was. For better or worse, I decided I had to kick up some dust in archives and libraries and reconstruct the historical journey that has led to today’s Romani settlements, villages and camping sites. At the same time I realized that, with the end of the communist systems of eastern and south-eastern Europe, the marginal topic of the Roma would become a central issue in the political, social and cultural con guration of the European continent, if for no other reason than that there were more than ten million of them. Ultimately, the vitality of the idea of Europe will necessarily also be measured by how it deals with Roma.

Why have Europeans perennially, as if by re ex, perceived these people as a threat, and why do they continue to do so today? What are the signi ers inscribed upon them, their bodies, their behaviour, indeed their very existence? Why is it that their presence and proximity is considered intolerable, and coexistence with them impossible? To nd plausible explanations, we need to look back at the medieval invasions and territorial annexations by Mongolians and Turks, who made their way to Europe, as did the Roma, via what was seen as the continent’s open, vulnerable eastern ank. The earliest European encounters with these foreign peoples, usually referred to as Tatars or Egyptians, underscored this connection, and the Roma’s nomadic way of life solidi ed the idea of them as a people from the steppes or the desert. While Romani clans, small and large, migrating to Europe were not considered

conquerors in the sense of Mongolians or Turks, they were often viewed as a relatively weak vanguard or as treacherous spies who had been left behind. From the very beginning, Europeans felt threatened by the foreignness of these peaceful migrants. Yet hatred for Gypsies was not just a variation of the xenophobia found, for instance, in anti-Semitism.3 A closer look at how the Roma’s relationship to native European populaces developed disproves the post-1945 idea that the exterminatory racism of Nazis against Jews and ‘Gypsies’ was the same. This book will not locate the Romani peoples as part of the history of anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews, as they have often been, for politically comprehensible reasons, by Sinti and Roma themselves. On the contrary, the roots, causes, development and function of hatred for Roma as well as the fascination with certain elements of their way of life differ from what we nd in anti-Semitism, even if some historical parallels and convergences do exist and modern sociobiological racism was equally bent on the annihilation of both Gypsies and Jews. To brie y sketch the major differences: Whereas Roma were considered mysterious foreigners of indeterminate origin, Jewish culture and identity was part of the foundations of European civilization and inseparably connected with Christianity. The point in time at which and the circumstances under which the Roma arrived in Europe were crucial for what was to come. Another equally signi cant difference was that Jews communicated their de nition of themselves to outsiders in various ways, while hardly anyone knew the rst thing about Romani culture. One important aspect of the fascination some people felt for the ‘Gypsy way of life’ and its non-written, oral tradition were the perceived parallels with the idea of ‘noble savage’ outside Europe, which became part of European folklore starting in the seventeenth century. If anything, the Roma, with their disregard for material possessions, were seen as the opposite of Jews, as creatures of forests, heaths, steppes and the road, and not of cities, commerce, science and culture.

The attempt to capture the unmistakable uniqueness of this story of persecution and fascination requires us to go back to the earliest sources and extend our investigation across Europe. Any merely national perspective, especially one focusing on Germany, where the darkest period in the country’s history, Nazi genocide, would have necessarily been the starting point, would have been too restrictive. At the conclusion of my research for this book, I had enough material for a multi-volume study.

I have condensed it to a single one while trying not to lose sight of the larger European dimension. Nonetheless, I have refrained from tracing every national history individually, preferring instead to look more intensively at places like sixteenth-century Spain or nineteenth-century Hungary that featured major developments or signi cant literary works that often in uenced other European cultures. The idea is to present the larger context without allowing the individual strands of history to unravel. I have also reduced the ponderous academic apparatus to a minimum while hopefully not sacri cing any important research ndings and insights. I do not explicitly go into the theory at the basis of my work but rather trust that it will make itself felt in my concrete depiction of the Romani past. Expert circles are by no means deprived of the opportunity to present their own perspectives to the readers whose curiosity and interest I hope to enlist.

There are very few European phenomena that are observable over a number of centuries. The history of the Roma allows us to uncover the patterns of how various societies, often crudely lumped together as ‘Occidental’, underwent an epochal transformation. Many groundbreaking academic projects of the previous few decades have followed the logic of their own ambitions and focused on ‘great’ historical events: the ‘process of civilization’ (Norbert Elias), the creation of states and nations, and the revolutions and seismic shifts between eras (Reinhart Koselleck), larger intellectual movements such as the ‘process of theoretical curiosity’ (Hans Blumenberg), the role of religion and religiosity and special developments like the history of education in Germany (Georg Bollenbeck). From the outset of this project, I asked myself whether we might not also be able to gain insight into the ‘long-term developments of civilization’ by looking at what was marginalized and never found its way into our historical memory because it was considered too insigni cant. The Roma, who came to Europe along a variety of routes and eventually arrived almost everywhere on the continent, including the British Isles, are one such marginal European phenomenon. Yet despite their diverse national, regional and linguistic characteristics they were perceived, identi ed, accepted and rejected in a conspicuously similar fashion everywhere. This can help us better understand the European development towards modernity. From their arrival in Europe, during the transition from the medieval to the modern period, Roma were caught up in epochal upheavals they were powerless to

escape, almost as though they had washed up from some past age on the shores of modernity. Thus, they rapidly came to represent –  mostly in negative fashion – a long-overcome stage of development and behavioural patterns that provoked embarrassment and rage in their contemporaries. European societies on the cusp of modernity searched for ways of viewing these suddenly present foreigners that would assign them a societal space. From its very onset, this process was very emotionally charged and accompanied by defensiveness, discrimination and persecution.

What did Roma think and feel? Here, we look back upon an impenetrable fog that will likely never lift. There are no reliable sources. Conversely, we are continually confronted with the fundamental experiences of a hierarchical, land-bound populace encountering a way of life they perceived as foreign and threatening. We, too, run the risk of lapsing into the sort of inattention, imprecise observation and slipshod description that created ‘foreigners’ instead of bearing witness to them. The image of the ‘Gypsy’ is exotic, blurry and open to interpretation. In compensation, the moral judgements and assumptions about these people became all the more cutting. When Enlightenment anthropologists around 1800 ‘discovered’ that the Gypsies were a people from India with a language derived from Sanskrit, two contradictory tendencies arose that would cross paths in mid-nineteenth-century ethnography. Firstly, researchers, writers and government of cials did everything they could to reduce these Indo-Europeans to parasitic pariahs resistant to civilization. Meanwhile, the Romantics unleashed droves of picturesque and uncanny Gypsy gures, creating a whole genre, Gypsy romanticism, that made these people a xture of the incipient mass media. The Gypsy way of life, with its presumed primeval lack of artice, independence and freedom, was stylized into a multifaceted alternative to bourgeois, industrial society. The late nineteenth century saw a new phase, as knowledge about the various Europe Romani groups, which had been collected by social science researchers and transmitted to the public at large, was interpreted through the lens of theories of criminality and race. This perspective, which explicitly called for direct punitive state action, denigrated the nomads of folklore and transformed them, using pseudo-scienti c argumentation, into anti-social, work-shy freeloaders. But the ‘grand narrative’ about Roma as a people of nature amidst European civilization was at all times –  from their arrival in Europe to the genocide perpetrated by

the National Socialists – written without any input from those people themselves.

From the very beginning, the invention of ‘Gypsies’ in these grand narratives was the reverse of the creation of the European cultural subject that saw itself as the bearer of global civilization and progress. At the same time, it helped radically cleanse the European self-image of everything threatening. Human beings’ treatment of Gypsies is comparable to their fear of dementia, in which they experience a fellow human devoid of everything human: as relapsed into an animalistic state, having lost language, writing, memory, history and everything cultural, all of which makes up a signi cant portion of our identity. This is precisely the image of the Gypsy created by European culture as a people without writing, history and culture, as something animalistic.

This book will tell a different story, one of history that progresses without making progress and of changes, squandered and destroyed chances, of which Europe cannot be particularly proud –  in Zygmunt Bauman’s words, a story of the ‘alternative, destructive potential of the civilizing process’.4 This is what can be described as ‘the evil memory of culture’. This story features three interwoven levels: a genealogy of knowledge about ‘Gypsies’ in all its forms from legends to academic studies, from empirical observations to chimeric presumptions5 and lies; an archaeology of the structures and patterns in which this information was represented and traded, especially in literary discourse; and nally a cultural history of those elements of both that have become part of the European historical memory, what effects they had and what developments they spurred or hindered, accelerated or retarded.

Let me remark on the terminology I have chosen. As we become acquainted in this book with the reality of people who existed in the past and in some cases still exist today, we will speak of the Roma, which is the most inclusive designation. The word in the Romany language means ‘man’ or ‘spouse’ and encompasses the subset of German Sinti.6 In the nineteenth century, the word Roma referred primarily to those clans living in eastern Europe. Large groups of Spanish Roma called themselves ‘Calé’, while French Roma referred to themselves as ‘Manouches’ and Russian ones as ‘Kalderash’. We will use these terms as well to locate people more precisely in social and ethnic terms. The term cigani ‘Gypsies’, which is foreign to Romani and whose origin has never been satisfactorily established, as well as other words like Tatars

or the German Zigeuner, is a major topic of this book and part of the phenomenon of fascination and contempt it examines. People were born Roma or Sinti. ‘Gypsies’ are a social construct based on a basic corpus of knowledge, images, motifs, behavioural patterns and legends, collective characteristics rst ascribed to the people in question when others talked about them. This corpus coalesced into tropes of thought and perception, which were robustly traded yet also subject to constant alteration according to rules this book will attempt to identify. Because this element of our examination will concern habits of speech and media images, an invented ethnicity and not thinking, feeling and acting human beings as equal subjects, the term Gypsies will now be used mostly without scare quotes. There are enormous discrepancies between the representation of imagined Gypsies in various discourses, above all, in art and literature, and the almost complete absence of historic selfportrayals of Roma, who long led nomadic lives, had no written language of their own and were without a political voice. This book will attempt to nd reasons for this discrepancy. Concentrating on the history of external images doesn’t rule out also looking in archives, scholarly essays and works of literature to try to learn something about the actual culture, ways of life, history and language of Europe’s Roma.

I will place special emphasis on literature because it is only through close textual analysis that we can go beyond the conclusions of history or sociology. In literary works, according to Foucault, we nd that historical events have left behind traces, continue to exist and in so doing have open or concealed effects within history.7 Yet unlike historical sources, the uniqueness and multivalence of literary texts aren’t easily comprehended. Works of literature can both trade in and unmask images and clichés. They can reinforce and undermine common assumptions. In order to reveal the automatic repetition of tropes alongside literature’s special quality and deviation from norms, we will supplement detailed analysis of some works with comparisons to as many other, often forgotten, ones as possible. They will, however, remain in the background to keep this book readable. For that reason, too, we will alternate between studies of representative individual examples and surveys of the larger landscape.

Perhaps disbelief will be the dominant impression left behind from the destructive energy and fantasies of power and annihilation documented in this book. Perhaps it will be a sympathy with the victims of

this story and this history. We should not forget, however, that this book is primarily concerned with the inventors of the construct of ‘the Gypsies’ and that for the reasons discussed above the history of the Roma can only be sketched out indirectly. The main protagonists of this book are the scholars, intellectuals, writers and researchers –  the creators of culture –  whose knowledge and skills produced enmity and discrimination, but also fascination and romanticization. While we may feel emotional outrage at them, we can also calmly identify the responsibility they bear. In this sense, it is important to explain what alternatives, directions and possibilities were open to these gures from the past. It simply isn’t very illuminating to portray the history of Roma suffering as an inevitable destiny, as many historical treatments tend to do.

The author of a book like this one will face stubborn questions about what lessons should be learned. No sooner has one brushed off the dust of the archives than one is called upon to raise a warning nger of chastisement. Perhaps one is in fact able to recognize threats early on, to draw precise connections between then and now and to compare various constellations. But the solutions to con icts and problems cannot be left solely to experts, whose knowledge can at most alleviate or exacerbate perceived crises. Even if it is primarily about the invention of an antipode to the peoples of Europe, this book will allow readers to look in the mirror. We will learn more about ourselves, our thoughts, emotions and behaviour, about exclusion, appropriation and the arrogance of civilization, than about the Roma. Reading the texts to be discussed, we will get a sense of the asymmetry produced in every denomination, description and evaluation of Gypsies as foreigners –  a sense of how authorial egos swelled, fell prey to fantasies of power and ultimately came to believe they were serving European culture, no matter how pathetic a gure those authors may themselves have cut. Given the current revival of hatred of ‘Gypsies’ in Europe, the history of enmity towards them may seem terrifyingly familiar and recall anti-Semitism and nationalism – those ghosts of which playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote: ‘It’s not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them.’ Ibsen is right if we de ne ‘getting rid of’ as repression. Conversely, this book will dispute the notion that con icts, problems and historical catastrophes are inevitable. Ghosts like the

European anti-Gypsy hatred can be dispelled if they are dragged from the darkness of hostility towards the foreign and the Other into the light. The uni cation of Europe is one of those rare situations in which we can get a handle on both present-day social and ethnic discrimination and the ghosts of the past: the recent past, about which the survivors of persecution and destruction no longer remain silent, and the historical past whose story this book will tell.

Part One

From the Late Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century

The Arrival of the ‘Pilgrims from Egypt’: Fragments: Chronicles, Historiographies, Legal Documents

In the beginning was the chronicle. There’s not a single self-written document, nothing left behind, not even a scrap of cloth or a shard of pottery, that bears witness to the fteenth-century arrival in Europe of a group of people who would soon become known as Gypsies in English, bohémiens in French, heathens in Dutch, Tatars in Swedish, gitanos in Spanish and Zigeuner in German.1 Only the chronicles public scribes in many cities had begun to keep, more or less assiduously in the thirteenth century, record the appearance before town gates of inscrutable foreigners ‘every one of them strange / and never before seen in this land’.2 Having never seen or heard of these people, chroniclers had little choice but to come up with fanciful explanations of their origins and nature. Many were quite good at it. The famous 1493 ‘world chronicle’ by Hartmann Schedel (1440–after 1514), for instance, had no problem inventing twisted genealogies of tribes and conquerors and found reports and evidence for such abstruse gures as dog-headed and headless, giant-footed and six-armed people.3 But until Roma showed up at the gates of numerous European cities from Stockholm to Barcelona, even the best-educated historiographers knew nothing about them. Chroniclers weren’t eyewitnesses. They wrote down what others told them. To make alien phenomena communicable and plausible, they had to nd familiar words and images.

One of the earliest visual depictions of the ‘black-skinned, baptized heathens who came in a group to Bern’ can be found in the so-called Spiez Chronicle of Diebold Schilling the Elder (c. 1445–86).4 The illustrator concentrated on two elements.5 In the background, we see the walls and towers of a city empty of people, identi able as Bern by the bear in the coat of arms over the gate. In the foreground, a group of

closely huddled people obviously seeking protection takes up almost a third of the space. Men are depicted in detail in the front, with women and children of various ages to their rear. The people in the foremost row gesture with their arms, hands and ngers expectantly towards the city. In front of them, a path winds its way to the gate. The only indication that these new arrivals are Gypsies is in the caption. This illustration hardly conforms to the impressions communicated in the chronicles’ reports. There are no horses or pack animals, and the people have few possessions or baggage. They don’t wear the ripped, torn and patched-together rags Gypsies do in later depictions. Instead, they appear in ‘Saracen’ or Oriental garb with turban-like head coverings. The at round hats reminiscent of plates worn by the women in other early depictions are also missing.6 Everyone, even the children, is wearing shoes. Their shirts and robes are colourful but not brightly patterned. Golden pins adorn the men’s turbans and gold-trimmed shirts, and they bear ornate, curved swords. One of the gures is singled out as the leader by his position, posture, dress and copious beard. The gure is highly comparable to the aristocrats depicted in the Spiez Chronicle. There are no indications, such as crosses, that these people have been baptized. And in contrast to the caption, these ‘black heathens’ are all light-skinned and blond.

Late-medieval illustrators obviously did not remain faithful to anything they themselves had seen. Occasionally they might try to follow more closely what they had read in chronicles. But more often than not, they availed themselves of a familiar iconographic repertoire: the walled city, for instance, or feudal, caste-divided society. The histories of kings and popes were given illustrations that showed the insignia of kings and popes in general, not the uppermost of the individuals in question.

Thus, in the beginning there was the chronicle, and that represents a problem. What little we can turn up about Gypsies after arduously searching the dark corners of archives is disappointingly unreliable and contradictory, as are many other sources from the rst 250 years of these people’s presence in Europe. We have no visual representations from this period that are in any way documentary. The traces that can be found in the archives, scholarly works, literature and art are just sparse bits concerning the culture, way of life, history and language of this minority: laboriously collected fragments about the life of a closed group whose economy of survival was determined by minimal, short contacts with the outside world.

We do, however, have something else. When read with the proper eye, the chronicles do pass on the experiences of a feudal, agricultural population with a group of foreign migrants who didn’t settle in any one place and were perceived as a threat. These experiences were re ected almost without exception in stories and images of rejection and ‘dis gurement’. In the Spiez Chronicle, the unknown gures were lumped in with a group of familiar foreigners, the Saracens, thus making it seem inappropriate that they should be immediately turned away. By contrast, other chronicles were quick to promote images of dangerous unpredictability and revulsive disgust, sometimes explicit demonization. It would be a long time before the Romantics throughout Europe would create an imaginary realm of mystery and wonder in which the Gypsies were given a home.

The sudden appearance of these foreigners left the natives with a host of questions. Why had they migrated? Where did they come from? What were their intentions and destinations? As is apparent from the chronicles, people at the time were less interested in Gypsies’ existence per se than with their representation, with the self-image Gypsies communicated to the outside world and the images people created of them. In her writings on the gure of the pariah, Hannah Arendt (1906–75) distinguished between the depiction and inevitable social role of people with no rights as the ‘hunted animal’ and the existence, the deeper representation, of someone wholly Other, to which only people’s actual existence as pariahs can bear witness.7 Society’s disinterest in pariahs’ true existence signals that we are truly dealing with an excluded group, even though our view of them may be distorted. In the words of the philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels: ‘To a certain degree we invent our answers, but we do not invent what questions they are answers to.’8

It was in this sense that fteenth-century Europe invented Gypsies. The fact that they appeared on the threshold between the Middle Ages and the modern era, an epoch of disintegration and reordering, never to disappear again, underscores the signi cance of this marginalized group. European societies positioned them within the spectrum of social outsiders, as people on the outermost fringe of civilization who could not be integrated. To exclude people from society because they are perceived as permanently foreign creates an untenable position, which can only be maintained by constantly reinventing those people’s otherness and ascribing to them and reinforcing the sense of their ethnic, legal, social,

economic and cultural peculiarity. The ‘outermost fringe’ may mark a boundary. However, we must envision it not as a set border but rather as a constantly changing transitional space. Nor is exclusion a one-time act. It is an ongoing process serving two purposes. On the one hand, it enables society to exert control over a group like the Gypsies whose internal structures are obscure and that would otherwise be impossible to regulate. On the other hand, it allows classes of people and groups from the majority society, who otherwise number among its powerless, lesser members, to participate in this control –  although there is no guarantee that they themselves will not be relegated, too, to the status of pariahs, beyond integration, on the social margins. The history of poverty in the early modern era provides examples of such situations. By examining peripheral phenomena that rarely found their way into traditional histories of major events, we gain insights into longer-term developments that ultimately led to various societies’ breaks with civilization itself in the twentieth century.

The illustrated Spiez Chronicle and other, similar contemporary documents, stand at the beginning of this process, as part of the old European society that rested secure in the conviction that the world was divinely ordered, even as it was already being internally shaken. Foreigners like Roma had to be incorporated without endangering this order. The rst step was to spatially x these rootless, unfamiliar people: namely outside the protective walls of the city, at a safe distance from natives. To this end, chroniclers made use of knowledge that, although not truly concerning the foreigners, could be applied to them and made authorial inventions seem believable. The illustrator of the Schilling Lucerne Chronicle viewed the new arrivals as wealthy, converted Saracens from either the Ottoman Empire, which was expanding towards Europe, or the Holy Land. This was a rather unlikely scenario, albeit one that closely conformed to the 1538 Swiss Chronicle by Johannes Stumpf (1500–1578) and its sources. There we read the following:

In this year 1418, the Gypsies rst came that’s how the heathens are called in Helvetia to Zürich and other places . . . their numbers, men women and children, were estimated at 14,000 but they never came in crowds but now and then, dispersed. They claimed/they had been expelled from Egypt and forced to do miserable penance for 7 years. They maintained

Christian discipline and wore much gold and silver although their clothes were poor. They had been equipped by their relatives in their fatherland with money they did not lack resources paid for their food and drink and after seven years they returned home.9

The points of agreement in this passage are the composition, Christianity, wealth and Oriental origins of the group, if not its exaggerated numbers. An even more conspicuous commonality is the attribution of these people to something familiar. Pilgrims and penitents wandering the land, alone or in groups, well equipped or poor and begging for alms, in hopes of achieving eternal salvation, were part of everyday medieval reality. In this context, while almost certainly a legend, the Gypsies’ supposed Egyptian heritage, re ected in the very word ‘Gypsy’, made this story of origin seem plausible, as did the reference to the number seven, which was popularly considered holy because of its prominent role in the biblical story of creation. The ‘misery’ (German: im Ellende ) alluded to in the text refers not just to material poverty but also to the regrettable condition of being cast out of one’s homeland. That explains the Gypsies’ sudden arrival and the hopeful gaze they direct towards Bern, which is depicted as a place of Christian charity and refuge for pilgrims needing protection. Remarkably –  and not only because other chronicles assume the opposite – the Swiss Chronicle proposes that the Gypsies have a ‘fatherland’ beyond the Mediterranean to which their ties remain unsevered. It goes without saying that there is no evidence whatsoever for this notion in either contemporary genealogies or travel reports. Nonetheless, this chronicle speci cally mentions an emotionally charged promise that these people could return home after their penance had been done. Romantic author Achim von Arnim (1781–1831) would adopt this narrative in his story ‘Isabella of Egypt: Emperor Charles the Fifth’s First Youthful Love’, ful lling the promise in the realm of ction. It doesn’t really matter whether the adventurous tales of penance and pilgrimages in the picture European societies constructed of Gypsies were told by the new arrivals themselves or invented by the chroniclers and their sources. The crux is that those tales became received wisdom and were considered worthy of being passed on.

So who were the people contemporary observers around 1400 awaited from their city towers? What itinerant groups, tribes and communities could be used to identify these ‘foreign, previously unseen

wandering crowds of people’ –  to cite one of the earliest sources on Gypsies, the chronicle by Hermann Cornerus (c. 1365–c. 1438) from the northern German city of Lübeck?10 Nomadic shepherds or hunters moving across the lands of central Europe had disappeared centuries earlier. The unexpected arrivals of people displaced by war, conquest or natural catastrophe must have become a rare occurrence. Far more familiar, at least in the minds of natives, were attacks by Mongols and Tatars and their reconnaissance and vanguard troops. And much more welcome were the regular visits from traders, merchants and travellers, especially from far away, since they brought diversion, news and the possibility of acquiring scarce commodities. Something similar also applied to the columns of pilgrims whom the social order expected to be accommodated, provided for and protected and who customarily legitimated themselves with letters of protection and introduction. This practice clearly played a major role in how Gypsies were de ned. At the point when they arrived in Europe, the lines between the many groups of pilgrims and the constantly growing class of beggars and transients were blurred, so that Gypsies were also assigned to this rather amorphous group.

The chroniclers and, a short time later, early modern historians and scholars used all the possible sources of identi cation available, both plausible and absurd. Sometimes they proceeded metonymically, generalizing upon a partial observation or single characteristic. Or they jumbled together various qualities into protean gures that could serve various needs. Stumpf’s Swiss Chronicle, for instance, combines the characteristics of the refugee with the pilgrim into a religiously in ected idea of seven-year penitents. By contrast, Andreas of Regensburg’s 1424 Diarium Sexennale identi ed Gypsies as ‘secret explorers in the land’,11 and the Reichsabschiede (Reich Recesses) of 1498 and 1500 as ‘experiencers / spies / and information gatherers in the land of the Christians’,12 i.e. agents of the enemy Turkish army. This completely different image of Gypsies as foreign nomadic spies had no basis in fact. In both cases, little light was shed on the migrants and considerably more on how the natives treated foreigners. Pilgrims from the Orient were given shelter and alms for a limited time. Spies from the east were persecuted, punished and driven away without sympathy or pity. Around 1400, foreign pilgrims still enjoyed a broadly recognized status. Their religiously motivated behaviour allowed them

to mingle with the communities they visited and granted them a certain level of trust. Those suspected of being spies were rejected morally and excluded since they were distrusted, and it was feared they could damage the community. Mistrust, vigilance, surveillance and precaution kept uncanny foreigners at bay.

The chronicles were quite inventive, employing an impressive array of descriptive tools: striking sketches, memorable details and stories that inject structure and order into collections of anecdotes, observations, reports, suppositions and rumours, into dull repetitions and witty fabrications. It wasn’t just a handful of German cities worried about their funds for the poor that recorded the Gypsies’ arrivals in their community annals. Native people throughout Europe reacted in a similar fashion, as if they had been waiting for another people, along with Jews, whose non-European, mysterious way of life could serve as a measure of the distance to the native world order. Along with German and Swiss cities from Lübeck to Augsburg to Bern, reports of Gypsies have survived from Brussels (1420), Deventer (1420), Nijmegen (1428), Bologna and Forli (1422), Milan (1457), Paris (1427), Barcelona (1447), Lwów (1444) and Vilnius (1501) as well as places in Scotland (1505), Denmark (1511), Sweden (1512), England (1514) and Finland (1540). Before long, European pilgrims to the Holy Land were keeping their eyes peeled during their arduous and perilous journeys for the ‘Egyptians’. In reports from 1482, 1486 and 1498, the authors believed they had located the ‘homeland of the Gypsies’ in the port city of Methoni on the Peloponnesian Peninsula.13 The travellers warned their readers that, like Jews, Gypsies were prone to betraying af uent pilgrims to the Turks in hopes of extorting ransom.14

Despite the paucity of reliable sources, the mention of an impoverished settlement of blacksmiths in Methoni is a serious indication that south-eastern Europe was a main region where Gypsies lived before migrating west and north. Otherwise, we have no way of interpreting the oft-used formulation in the chronicles that Gypsies had come from far away. What did that mean in an era when travelling, say, the 264 kilometres from Augsburg to Basel in good weather took more than a week? As long as such people could present letters of protection from the German and Hungarian king and later emperor Sigismund (1368–1437), sealed in the Zips region of Bohemia, or similar documents from the pope in Rome, the chroniclers didn’t ask them where they had been

before that. Their imagination was focused far more on legendary tales about Gypsies’ origins in mythical times and places.

The situation was initially no different in what is today Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria. Although Gypsies settled there early on, they were still connected with the Ancient Egyptians in ways that can no longer be reconstructed. Nineteenth-century Moldova historian Andreas Wolf wrote:

The Gypsy people came from Asia Minor around the year 1417 rst to Moldova, then Wallachia and then on to Hungary and Transylvania. They were already known as pharaohs. They were subjugated to their voivods, who had been named in a decree of the Hungarian King Vladislaus from the year 1496, the Vayvodæ Pharaonum, and one was appointed by his name, Thomas Bolgar, as Vayvoda Pharaonum. It also determined that each of the voivods would have 25 Gypsy tents under him.15

More signi cant than the allusion to the social structure of Gypsy princes, kings and lords, which we will repeatedly encounter, is a reliable 1385 source that reports ‘the Wallachian voivod Wladislaw . . . gave 40 Gypsy families to the abbey of St Antonius Vodici in Wallachia’.16 This document speaks of serfdom and slavery, both of which existed in Romania until 1856, when it became the last country in Europe to eradicate them. However, slavery also meant that, early on, native society succeeded in incorporating the migrants into their caste system of feudal Boyar absolutism. Whereas other European countries, with the exception of Spain, pursued policies of long-term exclusion, Gypsies were assigned a position within Romanian society, albeit not a very attractive one, as serfs of landed aristocrats and monks and servants performing the lowliest and putatively most impure of tasks. The resulting anti-Gypsy contempt developed among Romania’s other social classes, which still persists today, focuses on their putative lack of education, the consequences of poverty, their alleged poor bodily and domestic hygiene and their ignorance of rules concerning food. What is foreign is thereby transformed into something utterly alien.

On the eve of modernity, integration did not mean becoming an equal part of society but rather being assigned a position in an immutable hierarchy and being kept within it. Nonetheless, that was different in western and northern Europe from being declared an enemy, which

resulted in being imprisoned or expelled. North of the Ottoman Empire, in regions which had been repeatedly depopulated by epidemics, famine and war, migrants of various origins were hardly unwelcome as ‘potential sources of labour and soldiers’.17 Historian György Szabó writes, ‘They placed themselves under the immediate protection of the king of one of the many feudal lords who provided the migrants with letters of protection and residence permissions.’18 In Bukovina, Moldovan Prince Alexander the Good (1400–1432) guaranteed ‘free air and land to move about in, and re and iron to forge with’.19 It is not unlikely that individual groups of Roma set out from there westwards, equipped with letters like that from King Sigismund, the original of which has been preserved.20

Whereas in southern Germany and western Europe, darkness of skin was interpreted as a sign of Oriental or African origin, in the northern German and Baltic realm, the Islamic-converted Tatars under Mongolian military commander Berke Khan, who ruled from 1257 to 1267, caused a mass migration that was far clearer and more present danger than the ‘Turkish peril’ further south. The word Tatars – which might have been related to Tartarus, the hell of Roman mythology –  established itself as a designation throughout the entirety of Low German and Swedish Europe.21 As late as the start of the twentieth century, authors Hermann Löns (1866–1914) and Wilhelm Jensen (1837–1911) used the term in their reactionary Heimatromane, or ‘novels of native soil’. Egyptians, heathens, Tatars . . . the semantic inconsistency with which these nameless foreigners were encountered obscures the politics of language at play. According to the Christian order of the world and Christian thought, these people were assigned the role of the non-Christian, the heathen and the godless – in opposition and irreconcilable contrast to the native society. The question of what overarching cultural signi cance Gypsies, as ‘baptized heathens’, could have for Christians, kept being posed well into the twentieth century, for instance, in the Catholic Church’s decision of cially to recognize the pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

Chronicles like the one from Lübeck are the earliest reliable sources we have on Gypsies. In the late thirteenth century, individual cities began to keep annals and records. The number of cities swelled in northern Germany in the mid-fourteenth century, which is why so many of the

chronicles are written in Middle Low German. This trend also produced an increase in reports about Gypsies. Initially, city scribes merely noted legal and administrative processes and regulations without any context, but as time passed, they recorded more and more events and incidents that shone a glorious light on their municipalities and ruling councils, helping to distinguish between good and bad governances. Several chroniclers avail themselves of the paradigm of the ‘history of the world’, beginning with Creation, to whose continued survival medieval people thought they contributed with their hard work and virtue. Other works such as the 1522 Annales Boiorum by Johannes Aventinus (Johannes Georg Turmair, 1477–1534) moved in the direction of coherent historiography. Chronicles like the one by Stumpf developed stylistic, literary ambitions insofar as they described, in vivid and often anecdotal fashion, everything from military con icts and natural catastrophes to everyday city life, mores and customs to details like market prices, wages and alms. For cities, these chronicles represented major documents of memory, education and entertainment. As a result, following Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, they were often ornately illustrated and printed in deluxe editions.

In the beginning – in fact for the rst 150 years we are talking about –  chronicles were all there was. Gypsies left no traces in goliard poetry, even though it focused on itinerants (varnde diet ). That is astonishing considering that the goliard clergymen and scholars praised themselves for having seen much of the world.22 The same is true of the wandering minstrels’ epics. Even in Salman and Morolf (c. 1190), an epic set in the Holy Land, and Duke Ernst (pre-1186), which features lush descriptions of the Orient and whose hero does battle against and takes home trophies of bizarre tribes like the ‘Crane People’, ‘Flat Hoofs’ and ‘Big Ears’, ‘Egyptians’ never make an appearance. Nor do the Arthurian romances by authors from Hartmann von Aue (c. 1150 / 60–c. 1210) to Gottfried von Strassburg (c.1200) feature any gures comparable to the Gypsies described in the chronicles. The same applies to Oswald von Wolkenstein (1377–1445), who travelled throughout Europe in the service of King Sigismund, the same monarch who issued a 1423 letter of protection for a certain ‘Ladislaus Woynoda and the Gypsies under him’.23 Popular medieval literature, whether epics or farces, displayed no interest in Gypsies, even after 1497, when their presence in Europe became the subject of debate at the highest level, including in imperial

diets. That would only change with Sebastian Münster (1488–1552), who devoted an entire chapter, including illustrations, to them in his widely read Cosmographia (Latin 1544, German 1550), which ran through numerous editions.

What events, observations, suppositions and stories did these chronicles record for posterity? First and foremost, there were the archetypal scenes of foreigners from unknown places far away appearing before cities asking for entry and assistance. ‘In the year of 1427, people came to Augsburg with their women and children,’ read one chronicle. ‘They said they were from Egypt and had a king. That must be in Rossenau [today: Romania]. Since then, these people have been called Gypsies. They’ve come here frequently.’24 The city chronicle of Lübeck provides more detail about the route these people took.25 Like other such documents, it assumes that the foreign penitents must have been part of a minority of heretics or converts among a Christian community. How else could they have bishops who ensured that Christian order was maintained? The image of penitent pilgrims is at odds, however, with accusations of thievery and fraud levelled by many chronicles, which located Roma in the vicinity of an entirely different social segment: that of vagrants, tricksters, deceitful beggars and thieves. What distinguished the former from the latter were the social hierarchy of the Gypsy kings and princes, who like European aristocrats were recognizable from their attire and behaviour, and the letters of protection they possessed from the highest authorities. The chronicler Andreas of Regensburg included in his writings a copy of one of these letters, ‘which they had on papyrus’, from the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund,26 thus preserving its content.27 This is not the only surviving letter. The city archive of Karlsruhe contains a letter of protection written by Count Friedrich von der Pfalz in 1471 for a certain ‘noble Batholomes from Little Egypt’.28 The city archive of Modena has a letter from an ‘Ioannes Comes from Egypt’ from 1485.29 And in 1488, Countess zu Leissnigk in Saxony wrote a letter on behalf of Count Nicolaus Caspar asking for him to be given free passage, accommodation and alms.30 Letters have also been preserved in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany: for instance, one from 1511 for a certain Lord Jürgen from Egypt.31 There is no way of telling whether the letters mentioned in most chronicles were genuine or not. It was not uncommon for beggars masquerading as pilgrims to present false papers.

Indeed, the trade in and use of false documents was one of the ways in which poor people survived. The 1510 Liber Vagatorum , which described the activities and equipment of beggars, fraudsters and thieves, told of ‘blackguards’ and ‘gangsters’ who passed themselves off as pilgrims to Rome.32 The idea found a later echo in Johann Peter Hebel’s (1760–1826) almanac tale ‘The Clever Pilgrim’. Beggars were aware of which cities and monasteries handed out alms on which days, especially when large amounts of money were doled out to the poor.33 Nevertheless, initially after they appeared in Europe, Gypsies weren’t automatically equated with beggars. They were considered penitent expatriates who voluntarily subjected themselves to poverty and homelessness and who were surrounded by a foreign aura of exoticism. For that reason, chronicles eagerly repeated legends about their origin and the reason for their penitence and generally did not accuse them of theft or classify them as tricksters and criminals. Cities mostly followed their Christian duty to be charitable, as numerous accounts of signicant acts of kindness attest. In 1428, for example, out of sheer altruism, the city of Nijmegen gave foreigners not just bread and sh, but ‘a barrel of good beer’.34 Frankfurt am Main’s chronicle described that city as no less generous in 1418, although people caught begging for alms twice were refused and a third attempt saw them banned from the city. In 1497, Gypsies were expelled entirely under the threat of violence. From that point on, there is no mention any more of letters of protection.35

In keeping with their behaviour, Roma were universally described as a hierarchical social unit, led by aristocrats. The Lübeck chronicle mentions a duke and count, a 1459 Scottish account speaks of a ‘Lord of Little Egypt’, a description in Bologna from 1422 features a certain Duke Andrea,36 and a 1459 chronicle from Zutphen in the Netherlands even writes of a ‘king of Little Egypt’ and a ‘King of the Heathens’.37 Romani leaders were described as engaging in aristocratic activities like horseback riding and the keeping of hunting dogs and possessing precious jewellery and valuable garments, while the other members of the group were resented as impoverished, obedient followers. Romani leaders did not just travel like aristocrats. They also had themselves buried with aristocratic pomp, at least in the fteenth century, when Gypsy burials had not yet been outlawed. Gravestone inscriptions bear witness to a certain Panuel, Duke of

Little Egypt (1445), a Count Petrus (1453) and Count Johann. ‘In the year of 1448 on the Monday after Urbani, the well-born Count Johan from Little Egypt passed away’, read one such inscription. ‘May God have mercy upon him.’38 Romani leaders were entitled to a different set of legal rules, a privilege guaranteed in letters of protection from Sigismund. Yet regional and city authorities often ignored those entitlements, especially when they were of the sort set out in a letter presented in Bologna in 1422 by a certain Duke Andrea of Egypt, which ‘allowed [the Gypsies] on the authority of the Hungarian King and Emperor to rob wherever they went for seven years without being legally censured’.39

Early on , Roma were accepted as a kind of miniature feudal society as long as there were no suspicions of them engaging in fraud or crime, and leaders were granted better accommodation within city walls while their ‘followers’ had to camp outdoors. One instance of respect and courtly rectitude that was passed on came from Spain with its strict code of aristocratic honour. In 1460, a group of Roma led by a Count Jakob and his wife Dona Loisa arrived at the city of Andújar. They were equipped with a ‘travel letter issued by our holiest father’. 40 They als o carried a second letter from the king: ‘Addressed by his Majesty to all his higher subjects and the residents of his royal lands, it ordered . . . all of them to accord the count in question every honour and give him a polite welcome.’ 41 The city military commander ordered that the count be received with courtesy. ‘He also ordered that the count and countess in question should dine with him every day and that all the things they needed should be handed out to them.’ 42 Fifteen days after they left, a Duke Paul of Little Egypt arrived with a handful of letters of recommendation. ‘The military commander in question paid him the high honours that were his due on account of his ducal title.’43 If moral and legal transgression didn’t become an issue, contact between natives and these foreigners were governed by established customs of Christian charity towards needy pilgrims and courtly respect and hospitality toward aristocrats.

Nonetheless a bit later, as described in Aventinus’ Annales Boiorum from 1439, the rules of courtesy were increasingly ignored, and the Romani leadership’s trappings of aristocracy were dismissed as criminal masquerade:

At the same time, this very larcenous people (or race), a mixture and excretion of various peoples from the Turkish Empire and Hungary (we call them Gypsies), began marauding through our territory under their king Zindelo(ne), providing for themselves exclusively and with impunity by theft and fortune telling. They tell the lie that they come from Egypt and were forced by their gods to leave their homeland. They shamelessly spin tales of undergoing seven years of exile to atone for the sins of their forefathers, who refused to accept the divine conceiver, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus.44

In Aventinus, we can see the rough outlines of a theory of origin that posits Gypsies as a well-organized collective of rootless, disenfranchised and lawless outcasts: a thievish people would be one possible translation of the Latin original. King Zindelone was like a gure from a novel. In the German translation of the Annales from 1580 he was called Zundel. And the Gypsies’ supposed homeland, the disputed Pannonia, a transitional region between the Occident and Orient, makes them appear, like all border people, more dangerous and incalculable. Two hundred years later, after the Turks conquered Hungary, the Gypsies were driven from the Austrian border regions because of fears that they were an enemy vanguard.45 The origin legends that initially served to build cultural bridges were dismissed as scams by professional fraudsters. But those who did still accept these legends saw the Roma’s wanderings as part of a sacramental ritual and their voluntary poverty pilgrimage as an indication of elevated piety and holiness. This made Europeans act shy. Many people believed that if one did harm to Gypsies, one could be punished by divine power or magic.

Legends: From the Bible to History

In an age when there was little distinction between ‘metaphor and truth’,46 the legends in the chronicles represent the rst attempts to plausibly explain the Roma’s nomadic lifestyle, which was without parallel in European society. Biblical analogies – or at least what the popular imagination considered as such –  possessed a particular explanatory force and had the great advantage of also being universally known. Like

other chroniclers, Andreas von Regensburg passed on a series of contradictory statements. Assertions such as that the Gypsy people ‘emigrated as a sign and in memory of the Lord eeing to Egypt before Herod who wanted to kill him’ would remain in currency until the twentieth century.47 This drastically abridged version of the biblical story was a crassly simpli ed ‘imitatio Christi’. It was a literally childish idea, insofar as Roma were thought to have collectively imitated an episode from Jesus’ life as a baby, yet also a sensible one at a time when travelling in family groups was only prudent. Other biblical tropes such as fasting in the desert, the life of the hermit and the Passion were other possible points of reference, albeit far less apt for a group of nomads. Eventually the narrative was established that God had ‘cast [the Roma] out of their native land’48 for refusing the Holy Family accommodation on their ight to Egypt.49 The suggestion that their way of life was caused by an original sin is obvious – a warning to sedentary Christians not to commit similar transgressions. Legends like this one were passed down in changing form through the generations in popular superstition. Jumping far ahead into the future to look at another example, an undated French picture sheet from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century from the series Imagerie Pellerin entitled Les Cinq Sous des Bohémiens depicts the Holy Family eeing before Herod’s soldiers. A ‘bohemian woman’, barefoot like Joseph and Mary, had hidden the baby Jesus in her beggar’s sack, saving his life with a trick. As a reward, God has ever since allowed Gypsies to steal ve sous a day with impunity, so the illustrated legend goes.50 In this simple story, told against a backdrop of poverty, morality and the law can be suspended in speci c situations while still applying generally. Much the same must have been the case with the legends, mentioned in chronicles, that aimed at soliciting alms.

Narratives like these de ned Gypsies in terms of their nomadic way of life. Since they were perceived as people who were ‘here today, gone tomorrow’, there was no need to depict them individually. On the contrary, crude stereotypical characteristics allowed audiences to quickly categorize them as a collective beyond the bounds of time and normal reality. The unsaved Gypsy, condemned to for ever roam the earth, was a fellow traveller of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew51 and part of a larger context of tales in which eternal homeless wandering was a punishment for denying shelter to the Holy Family. Other examples are the

blacksmith who forged the nails used in the Cruci xion and the descendants of Cain after he murdered Abel –  both of whom were condemned to roam the earth for ever.52 Popular nineteenth-century research, ever fond of romanticism, discovered and invented further fairy tales and sagas that spread the picture of a people condemned to nomadic life in the crudest of images. It was easy, for instance, to understand why Roma roamed from place to place as tinkers. But the popular legend of the blacksmith and the Cruci xion, which recalled the condemnation of an ‘entire guild to restless wandering’, contextualized this apparently scorned activity as one of the poorest forms of work, to be performed by people on the lowest fringe of society.53

One potentially positive view came from the religious interpretation of the Romani way of life as an earthly pilgrimage after being driven out of paradise. From this perspective, all ‘people . . . were Gypsies to a greater or lesser degree’.54 When John Bunyan included the religious belief in the fruitlessness of all earthly endeavour in The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), it was suspected that he, too, had Gypsy or nomadic heritage.

Legendary extrapolation of biblical events had been popular among Christians since late Antiquity, and the ight to Egypt was a particularly beloved motif, one which mirrored feudal despotism. It was an early form of stories about the powerful and famous in which audiences learn about their all-too-human sides. Meanwhile, the chronicles also recorded a kind of origin story that recalled the epic songs of the bards –  initially in simpli ed fashion. Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750), the founding father of Italian history, wrote in his 1730 Rerum Italicarum Scriptores :

On 18 July 1422, a duke from Egypt came to Bologna, whose name was Andreas [recte Andrea], with women, children and men from his country, more than 100 in total. The duke had fallen away from the Christian faith, and the king of Hungary took his land and himself. The duke said to the king that he wished to convert back to Christianity and was baptized together with his people, numbering around 4,000. Those who refused to be baptized were killed. After the king of Hungary had admitted and rebaptized him, he was told to travel the world for seven years. In addition, he was required to go to Rome and seek out the pope. Only then could he return to his homeland. When he and his people arrived in

Bologna, they had been travelling the world for ve years, and more than half of the group had died.55

This story, for which there is no historical evidence, combined various experiences into the tale of a people of victims caught between political and religious fronts: from the Crusades to the forced baptisms (‘conversion or elimination’) ordered by the popes to the class-based battles for territorial control and political hegemony in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Étienne Pasquier’s (1529–1615) Les recherches de la France of 1596 more closely linked this story of Romani origins to the vicissitudes of the military con icts in the Orient, owing to which they had been driven from their homeland in ‘Lower Egypt’.56 Both stories have an identical narrative structure. A volatile prehistory beginning with the loss of a homeland is followed by the explanation for the Roma’s current nomadism: the penance of a road to Canossa for a people under threat. The moral of the story, underscored by the letters of protection, was the imperative to be merciful in the Bologna version and charitable in the Paris one.

On one point, these historical tales are as unambiguous as the legends from the Holy Land. The unfamiliar nomads are interlopers who try to use their status as penitents and victims to shield themselves from attack. They are neither Christian Europeans nor Muslim Saracens, but rather a third group at home nowhere. They were a mutable personication of the nameless Other, who could be described however was wanted: as Egyptians, Tatars and Gypsies. The legends elicited contradictory responses. Sometimes they led to acknowledgement and acceptance. But more often, they provided the pretexts –  homelessness and helplessness – for expulsion and persecution and allowed new characteristics to be ascribed to this group. In the Basel Chronicle for the Year 1422, for instance, the tenor was completely reversed, with Gypsies being completely rejected as ‘a motley collection of villains, thieves and highwaymen’ and a ‘useless people’.57

The Basel Chronicle, written and printed some 150 years after the events of 1422, offered a compact, generalizing report composed from the standpoint of the state of knowledge at a later point in time. Much more clearly and sharply than Aventinus, the Basel chronicler Christian Wurstisen (1544–88) rejected the legends of Gypsy origin and assigned them to the marginalized, vagabond groups outside the caste system.

They were ‘strong’ beggars, i.e. able to work, who were impossible to control outside cities.58

In a similar fashion, despite recapitulating them extensively, the Italian chronicler Lodovico Antonio Muratori also decided to dismiss the stories of Gypsies’ ancient origins in favour of a negative value judgement: ‘They were the best thieves existing in the world . . . One should note that this was the worst rabble there ever was in this land. They were thin and black and ate like pigs.’59

In contrast to that of penitents and pilgrims, Gypsy poverty called forth disgust and revulsion. One example was Albert Krantz (c. 1448–1517) in his Saxonia, rst published in 1520. There he wrote of Gypsies living ‘in the manner of dogs’, a thinly veiled accusation of promiscuity and incest.60 Krantz’s account depicted Roma as violating Christian ideas of order and morality in provocative fashion. Their impiety, about which the author also complained, set them apart from the Saracens. Again, ‘Gypsies’ were assigned to a third position, resistant to categorization. The chroniclers all agree that these foreigners had ‘experience in all languages’. Not a single document records any dif culties in communication. That’s strange since, within the space of only a few years, Gypsies reached parts of central, southern and northern Europe, arriving in England and Scandinavia not long after that. That meant they would have had to speak Low German in Lübeck, Alemannic in Basel and Bern, Middle High German in Nuremberg, French in Paris and Italian in Bologna. Nonetheless, that may very well have been the case. The chronicles repeatedly note Gypsies’ mastery of several languages: ‘The majority speak the Slovenian language along with others like Hungarian, Italian, etc . . .’61 The Roma’s own language long remained a mystery. In Germany, France and England, it was considered a secretive, arti cial criminal slang, with the help of which the underworld could communicate.62 Aventinus believed he had evidence that ‘they speak the Venetian language’.63 But like others of its kind, this path leads nowhere. Roma were described as speaking the Slavic of eastern European peoples forcibly converted to Christianity around 1000 like the Sorbs and Slovenes and the northern Italian Venetian dialect. It is pure speculation to trace the Roma back to peoples like the Antique Adriatic Veneti.64 The polylingualism of a Romani group in Bavaria included a vaguely identi ed Slavic language mistaken for a mother tongue by the sources used by the chronicler there. Roma were able to produce letters of protection

and passage written in Latin and apparently translate them into various regional languages. The actual Romani language was never used as a means of external communication. It remained unknown for centuries, and even after that, nobody outside the group ever spoke or understood it.65 We can assume that Gypsies didn’t attend preparatory language classes in Turkey, Wallachia or Greece, where their wanderings are assumed to have commenced,66 or as German-Hungarian intellectual Johann Heinrich Schwicker (1839–1902) put it with typical nineteenthcentury arrogance, ‘uncultivated people only learn words from a foreign language in lively direct encounters, never from books’.67 All of this suggests that these people must have resided for a long time outside cities and away from notice. Either they continually took on members as they wandered through various lands and regions, as has been assumed by various sources since the sixteenth century, or Romani groups were polylingual from the moment they were formed and used the Romani language solely to communicate internally. Nevertheless, these are suppositions for which there is a certain logic but no hard evidence.

Nomads from No-Man’s Land

Fragments, legends, distortions. As ready as the chronicles are to pass on information about the Gypsies’ arrival in Europe, they provide no reliable accounts. They do, however, piece together from fragments a picture of these foreign émigrés, producing a rough sketch that would gradually be lled in by European national and regional cultures. There was no ordering system, with which they could coordinate knowledge about Gypsies, behaviour towards them and their symbolic representation in narratives and other depictions. Unlike with the Turkish conquests, for instance, the natives determined the rules of encounter with the foreigners and their position. That explains the great differences and arbitrariness from place to place. Whereas the hierarchy in images and narratives was quickly set and entered the general cultural archive, additions to the late medieval and early modern order of knowledge were only preliminary. Outsiders had yet to penetrate and gather reliable knowledge about the world of the Gypsies, which continued to be seen as closed, secretive and alien. The humanists would tirelessly

collect such knowledge and present it in encyclopedic form, while the thinkers of the Enlightenment would systematically deepen what had been learned. By contrast, the chroniclers kept their distance. There is not a single surviving account of a Gypsy who was accepted into native society or a native joining a Gypsy group. The Gypsies accrued a greater positive symbolic signi cance when they were accorded the status of pilgrims or nomads. That opened a semantic realm unifying the search for meaning and their lack of needs, freedom and marginality, which would last into the modern era and which would be discovered by Romantic aesthetics. Even in the fteenth century, the cultural order did not prevent people assigned to the lowest classes, that of fraudsters and beggars, from being rigidly excluded from society. The presence of foreigners, even more so when they were suspected of godlessness and immorality, stoked fears of losing control. In a society that considered their way of life a continual and intentional sin and an example of idleness and malice, the Gypsy foreigners seemed like an elemental threat to an everyday order Christian commandments had dif culty maintaining anyway. The connection and con ation of a group of outsiders with that part of the native population which broke the law or simply ignored it, viewed exclusively from a distance, encouraged the denigration and rejection of both. It also created a varied linguistic reservoir of rhetorical and aesthetic contempt – which still exists to this very day. Although an entire repertoire of possible de nitions came into play, with some even assuming concrete form, all that remained in the collective memory of the no longer consulted written records was the sudden appearance everywhere in Europe of a totally unknown people, whose foreignness only grew with every encounter. The situational definition of Gypsies as pilgrims, fraudsters or spies justi ed their treatment, both positive and negative, as well as their subjugation. But no matter how they were treated, Gypsies always lacked status. In a political order determined by feudal control of territory, ethnic and national identity had yet to become truly signi cant. Nonetheless, the chronicles make it clear that Gypsies were soon completely marginalized. Pushed out of focus, they disappeared from view except from a distance, in conjunction with sparsely settled regions and hordes of impoverished vagabonds, for years on end. When they did reappear, they were feared as inscrutable aliens, suspected of not being ‘Christian brethren’ at all. What’s more, native fears of Gypsies were based on mere hearsay, often arising before

any encounters, seldom as they were, took place at all. In the city chronicles and learned histories, the marginalized Gypsies became a central symbol of the Other in European societies, simultaneously unsettling and disruptive. While they had arrived in Europe, they remained nonEuropeans, homeless yet nonetheless with a xed place in the European symbolic order.

2

The Foreigners Who Stayed: ‘People of Infamy’

A half-century after their rst recorded appearances in Europe, the ‘poor homeless people from Little Egypt’ were still roaming through Europe begging for alms and accommodation.1 Their behaviour and selfunderstanding don’t seem to have changed, but the reactions of native populaces and authorities had, as attested more and more often in the chronicles. The authors of such were growing more loquacious and condent in their judgements and descriptions, while the measures taken against Gypsies became noticeably harsher. Residence rights guaranteed by letters of protection were increasingly ignored or rescinded, and the custom of handing out alms was on the wane. Within the Holy Roman Empire, the new Elector of the Palatinate threatened in his rst edict in 1472 ‘not to allow any Gypsies to travel through his blessed land or territories’.2 German and European states were subsequently ooded with new laws and ordinances. In 1504, Louis XII ordered Gypsies expelled from France. In 1514, they were driven from Swiss cities. In 1525, Charles V announced they would no longer be tolerated in Flanders. Their expulsion from England began in 1530, from Scotland in 1541 and from Bohemia in 1549. In 1557, the General Sejm in Poland decided to remove them, and as of 1583, Portugal forced gitanos to perform labour in ships’ galleys and in the Portuguese colonies. Those who were assimilated enough to become invisible or who, in Wallachia, worked as slaves for landed gentry or monasteries were spared deportation. Those who were visibly homeless and without a master or property were driven out like lepers.

We need to constantly remind ourselves that the Roma arrived in Europe in a period of profound disruption, rendering it more dif cult for them to orient themselves. For example, when they sought to bury their leaders in the manner of dukes or counts or presented themselves as

pilgrims, their model was the medieval social order, even when times had changed and they were making their petitions in early modern territorial and later national states. Historian Wolfgang Seidenspinner writes:

Since the Middle Ages, the desire to exercise power as smoothly as possible demanded that all subjects be incorporated into a spatially secured network in which they were available to the administration at all times and control over them was guaranteed, even while, as late as the early eighteenth century, ever more space and land were being seized. Absolutism extended to both places and people. Those who could not be made to t became masterless men, mere rabble.3

Soon, questions were asked about the Gypsies’ place in this politically remapped space. Allusion to their distant Egyptian origins didn’t satisfy the demands of territorial thinking. On the contrary, it left people bewildered. Historian Johann Heinrich Zedler describes the logic of the time: ‘[Egypt] couldn’t be their homeland, so the question became: where was their homeland actually? Where could it be located if the Gypsies were a nomadic people who weren’t at home anywhere?’4 In territorial European thought and societal practice the Gypsies’ peripatetic way of life was a conscious act of disengagement from the social, legal, economic and cultural systems being formed at the time. At this historical juncture, territorial positioning and acceptance were inseparably connected – a connection that continues today.

The territorial mindset assumes that everything on earth, including land and human beings, exists in relations of ownership and property. Soil and people are decisive resources bringing progress, af uence and power. Primarily for this reason, domination and control of space formed the core of early modern concepts of government. In Germanspeaking Europe this development was accompanied by the rise of what was known as Governing Economy (‘Policey-Wissenschaft’), which sought to comprehensively regulate ‘all culture, the populace, the planting of crops, the growth and adornment of the cities, manufacturing, factories and commercial branches and the entire food system’ as well as ‘domestic order, bourgeois virtues, internal security, the institutions to protect against res, wealth and the provision for the poor’.5

Identity was derived from origin, understood as both genealogy and speci c geographical location and which de ned overarching legal status. People with no place of origin simply had no status. Notwithstanding

whatever freedom that may have entailed, it meant being disenfranchised within the territory in which they moved. Nomadic groups like the Gypsies were no longer considered poor people whom native communities needed to take care of, but rather destructive elements resistant to the blessings of civilization and progress. In the terms of twentiethcentury French sociologist Robert Castel, they were ‘individuals of lack . . . lack of resources and lack of belonging’.6 They were only of value if they could be forced to perform manual labour in entrenchments or galleys or to ght as soldiers.

An example from the late seventeenth century illustrates that not even traditionally highly valued activities like clearing land for agriculture were enough to establish community belonging. In the German-Czech region of Fichtelgebirge, Gypsies planted a subsistence garden, which they were forced to give up due to property claims. Thereafter, the local populace believed they had left behind magic powers on the spot, and ‘country people would visit every St John’s Eve to pick herbs and owers to make a tea credited with particularly strong healing powers’.7 It wasn’t the Gypsies’ work that elicited admiration, but their supposed supernatural powers, which popular superstition believed to derive from their otherness. In contrast, foreigners who were considered useful, such as French Huguenots in Germany or German specialists and settlers in Russia, were warmly welcomed and promised that they could retain their native culture and language.

The incipient wave of administrative registration measures led to a new form of identity that includes time and place of birth, family line, religion, citizenship and criminal record. This transitional phase, in which people were only interested in the truth of the legends surrounding Gypsies’ origins to justify their expulsion, produced grotesque constellations. A Swiss chronicle complained: ‘In the year 1646, a considerable-sized horde of Gypsies were taken into custody. Their leader called himself Hans Heinrich Löwenberger from Little Egypt, although he was born in Brenngarten.’8 On the other hand, a Christiane Schmitt, who was arrested in 1762 with a group of Gypsies, vigorously rejected any moral condemnation, ‘because she did not come from Egypt but was, rather, born in the German Palatinate’.9 German authorities argued much as the Spanish government had in 1749 in a comparably vexed situation that Schmitt ‘led a Gypsy-style life, wore [Gypsy] garb and claimed . . . to be a fortune teller as all Gypsies do’.10

Authorities began to ask questions about Gypsy origins, with two possible outcomes. If those of Romani descent acknowledged their heritage, they were classi ed as part of a discrete people who were presumably able and thus required to return to their original homeland. If they said they were born ‘near Brenngarten’ or some other place on the map, they were de ned as part of the ‘motley riff-raff’ of tricksters and beggars.11 In both cases, according to the new understanding of the law, they could be arrested and deported from the ‘territorium clasum’. It is legitimate to see such principles of exclusion as a stage along the path to National Socialist policies of genocide.

On the eve of the modern era, territorial thinking became what German literary scholar Jürgen Link has termed a ‘normative idea’,12 including unconscious assumptions about identity, which, though unable to provide quanti able criteria for traits and actions, elevated the native way of life to an imperative. No group in Europe contradicted this normative ideal more than the Roma. European nation-states assumed that, eventually, all foreigners on their territory would disappear, either through assimilation and integration or forced emigration and expulsion. The Gypsies’ nomadism, their insistence on being able to move freely through both nature and the human world without completely adapting or submitting to the norms and laws of host societies, was the complete opposite of territorialism. In their more than 600-year history in Europe, Roma have never made any national or territorial claims. For those who de ned themselves in such narrowly territorial terms, these de-territorialized human beings were the prototype of the Other, and the latter’s appearance in the early modern period would eventually unleash the wildest fantasies of exclusion and elimination.

With remarkable historical prescience and in the spirit of the Enlightenment, Johann Rüdiger (1751–1822), a professor of mercantile studies in the German city of Halle, had already pointed out in the late eighteenth century that Gypsies had emigrated to Europe during a historically very unfortunate phase of upheaval. ‘They encountered the European states progressing in steps from barbarism to civilization, rendered too weak by the disruption of the old feudal system to resist local invasions but made too strong by the popular masses and the beginning of orderly political constitutions to be overrun completely by a rst wave,’ Rüdiger wrote.13 He also complained that insuf cient distinction was made ‘between their ideas of legal freedom and ownership and ours’ and that

Gypsies’ ‘natural independence and primeval enjoyment of life’ were too often confused with ‘rebellion against the rule of law and an attack on property’.14 With hindsight, we today might emphasize that the persecution and expulsion of Gypsies in the late medieval and early modern periods took place simultaneously with the impoverishment, uprooting and marginalization of growing segments of the lower classes. But in the case of Roma, after-effects such as homelessness, criminality and begging also worsened the lot of a group that had never had any opportunity to better itself socially.15

Although the authorities comprehended that there were different groups of vagabond poor, many measures intended to preserve public order lumped them all together as ‘rabble’ and ‘tricksters’. An ordinance concerning ‘itinerant people’ from 1586, for example, de ned its targets as ‘Gypsies, highwaymen, masterless knaves, players of ddles, lyres and other stringed instruments, scoundrels, spies, tooth breakers [travelling quack dentists] and that sort of loose rabble as well as fortune tellers, demon catchers and crystal-ball readers’.16 Nonetheless, differentiations continued to be made that should have protected Gypsies against unconstrained persecution since their communal way of life conformed to the still in uential early Christian ideal of poverty, as did their ‘shabbiness of dress, life without income, possessions or a house of their own, with lowly social status . . . beset by the daily suffering and punishments a life of deprivation entails’.17 Both the legends of Gypsy origins as well as the depiction of them in the chronicles suggested parallels with the desperate Holy Family, eeing from danger. The medieval provision of the poor had called upon such images, although charitable donors expected prayers for their souls in return for the alms they gave,18 and it was always questioned whether Gypsies, who were suspected of being heathens, were the proper mediators between wealthy Christians and their God. As the modern age dawned, Gypsy poverty was clearly de-sancti ed as they were increasingly considered ordinary, sinful ‘rabble’, who had lost any claim to assistance by engaging in theft, deceit, black magic and sexual pro igacy.19 The sums of money at stake were considerable. Cathedral chapters, after all, traditionally forfeited one-third of their tithes ad usum pauperum et perigrinorum (for the use of paupers and pilgrims). The public welfare system that had been borne by lords, cities, monasteries and communities collapsed for a number of reasons,

including not least the material hardship of broad segments of population due to plagues, failed harvests and wars. Europe would suffer under periodic famines from the early sixteenth until well into the eighteenth century. The industrial revolution proceeded rst and foremost at the cost of the lower classes.20 There is every reason to assume connections between the start of anti-Roma persecution and shifts in public policies towards the poor in the rst third of the sixteenth century,21 as charity was replaced by the valorization of labour as the source of prosperity, and the ideal of generosity toward one’s neighbours gave way to demands for individual responsibility. In the place of the Christian community, the state was now tasked with keeping the ‘dangerous’ masses peaceful and under control.

The early modern despots’ initial preferred means for carrying out this task was violence. Of cial memoranda and ordinances depicted the poor as a threatening, morally corrupt underworld, a ‘milieu of the night’.22 A dissertation from 1746 labelled the lowest of classes as ‘a lasting and treacherous association based on congress with fellows of similar ilk, which is designed to plunder all sorts of people and reject in the most malicious fashion every other honourable way of living’.23 The poor’s contradictory status was as people who were both excluded and trapped, people who ‘lived in the midst of society without being members of it’, as one French memorandum put it.24 This gave rise to wild fantasies that, in a mirror image of reputable society’s order, the lower classes inhabited underworlds of organized crime with their own laws and language.25 Such underworlds included the fraternity of beggars in the 1510 Liber Vagatorum (Book of Vagrants), which mentions Gypsies only on the margins,26 the kingdom of the Geuzen in France and a ‘royaume des truands’ in Paris,27 and the rogues’ gallery in the Canting Dictionary in England in 1725. The English Vagabonds Act of 1531 applied to everyone not anchored in society by either property or work as a serf, servant or underling and authorized the more severe punishment of whipping in place of the stocks.28

Very few literary works of the day penetrated the everyday life of poor people – with most that did being published in Spain or England. It is hard to tell in retrospect whether Gypsies feature in them. The most prominent example in German was Hans Sachs (1494–1576) in his 1559 Carnival Play for Six Persons, Called the Five Miserable Wanderers. 29 It

has a well-to-do burgher of the free city of Nuremberg encountering a group of ‘travelling people’. It begins with the man, an innkeeper, searching for the ‘most miserable wanderer’ to offer him free lodging and board.30 He is motivated by the spirit of Christian charity and a sense of duty to care for the poor, declaring ‘I do take pity / On the miserable and the poor.’31 Starting in the fourteenth century, cities in Europe had tried to ward off the burden of foreign beggars by passing restrictive ordinances. Nuremberg, for example, only permitted them to remain for three days within city con nes.32 References to the Holy Family’s search for refuge in Bethlehem lend Sachs’ play, which often reads like a coarse farce, the necessary gravitas. Among the ve wanderers –  alongside a teamster, a chandler, a mendicant and a poor knight – was a Gypsy. The others accuse him of stereotypical crimes: ‘He lies and steals / Does black magic and blasphemes / And practises deceit in plain sight.’33 Meanwhile, in an impressive monologue, the Gypsy describes the plight of the disenfranchised, homeless vagrant:

My wandering continues always Through every land without rest or peace . . . I have to carry my plunder myself

In heat and cold, through valleys and mountains. No one wants to give me refuge, When I sneak into a house, People would rather see me leave.

They don’t trust where I come from And I’m of little value, whether here or there. They push me back and forth to buy and sell.

Young and old avoid me.

Farmers often set their dogs on me.

Soon I will have to drag myself from a village.

Wherever I nd some straw to spend the night

My wife, my children and I are glad.34

The innkeeper ends this humiliating and absurd competition with a turn that underscores the moral of the story: ‘Then all ve of you are today my guests!’35 His prosperity and membership in the city community offer him security and protection. For that reason, he feels he has a duty to help the poor and helpless, especially as he himself used to be one of them:

I was often homeless, unfortunately Because my misery went around And God gave me nourishment. So I always provide shelter to Homeless wanderers in my inn.36

In addition to accommodating them, the innkeeper also gives each of the vagabonds ‘three coppers’.37 Hans Sachs’ intent was clearly to shame his own community, which he felt was neglecting its duties.

Sachs wasn’t the only one who saw Gypsies as part of the veritable army of the poor. Although the Roma were still perceived through the lens of ethnic foreignness, their new de nition as people without property, homes and status now primarily dictated how they were treated and encouraged their complete social marginalization. In the early days after their arrival in Europe, notwithstanding occasional superstitions that they were Turkish spies, there was little reason to more closely observe a non-warlike, nomadic group like the Gypsies who staked no claim to reside in any one place for any extended period. By the time of Sachs’ play, that situation has changed. In essence, the innkeeper is interrogating each of the homeless vagrants and demanding a confession from them to give him deeper insight into their way of life, their dishonest practices and their vices. That is no accident. As social problems worsened throughout Europe, Gypsies and poor people increasingly attracted the attention of both authorities – and authors.

Over the many years, until the end of the eighteenth century and the appearance of enlightened anthropologists and ethnologists, Gypsies’ place in society was as a part of the vagabond, marginalized lower classes. That was entirely different from Jews’ blanket ghettoization as an ethnic-religious minority.38 Nonetheless, Gypsies’ external appearance, language, dress and clannish social existence made them stand out within the larger transient population. In discussions about poverty and criminality, the lower classes were demonized as animalistic, brutish and cruel, sexually pro igate, sinful, lthy, ugly and godless. Gypsies were also denigrated, if not completely, by this constellation of ideas. The images of the poor owed their popularity to their con ation of social misery and criminality,39 and it was rare for anyone to contradict them. One of the exceptions was British novelist Henry Fielding (1707–54), who proposed in a 1753 essay that people tended to notice the

suffering of the poor less than their crimes, resulting in a dearth of sympathy. When the poor died of hunger or cold, he pointed out, they were largely among themselves –  they were only noticed by more af uent people when they begged, stole and robbed.40 In fact, secular and Church organizations, city burghers, country folk and writers primarily imagined the poor as a ‘hardcore of tricksters, thieves and robbers’.41 In this way, a non-transparent and allegedly lawless social class was given a recognizable face, that of organized crime. This was the result of an attempt to nd signals that could be deciphered and explained in the muddle of transient, alien, threatening masses,42 for the marginalized in general and for Gypsies in particular. ‘Poor society’43 was no longer directly subordinate to the upper classes and governmental administration – a change interpreted as an expression of the vice and malice of poor people themselves. One contemporary observer wrote: ‘Nothing today is better known than that these Gypsies are nothing but a motley assortment of malicious rabble that has no desire to work and that seeks its profession in idleness, theft, whoring, stuf ng their faces, drinking, gambling, etc . . .’44 Little remained here of the positive images of Christian poverty rewarded with everlasting life in the hereafter. People’s social and spatial distance from Roma allowed for an aggressive policy of symbols that directly affected relations of domination and power. The Canting Dictionary, for instance, confronted shocked readers with depictions of Gypsies being promiscuous, tearing into their food with ngernails and teeth like beasts and drinking like pigs, not like ‘human creatures’,45 exposing the helpless people thus described to defamatory violence. And political symbolism threatened to turn into actual physical violence, when a 1703 pamphlet proposed that ‘these beasts, who are only spanned with human skin, are not worthy of any divine or secular rights’.46 Disenfranchisement followed hatred.

Why was so much attention seemingly devoted to a group of such supposed good-for-nothings? In his essay The Lives of Infamous Men, French theorist Michel Foucault (1926–84) advanced the idea that in the early modern period, there was only one way that people and social classes seen as unworthy of remembrance could enter the historical archives: ‘What snatched them from the darkness of night in which they could, perhaps should, have remained was the encounter with power: without that collision it’s very unlikely that any word would be there to

recall their eeting trajectory.’47 Foucault’s proposition applies quite well to the Roma, who after the zenith of the chronicles, in the age of absolutism, were only rendered visible in the increasing number of criminal and legal documents.48 Socially and ethnically, they remained vaguely de ned as a ‘thieving, robbing, cheating, masterless and begging rabble’.49 But despite this catch-all designation, they still became disenfranchised subjects, ‘infamous’, people with no sense of honour who were characterized by their ‘fama’, their bad reputation.50

Territoriality as Terror: Persecution and Exclusion

In this context, we should recall that during what was for them a short late medieval period of transition, immigrant groups of Roma didn’t succeed in transforming the privileges granted to them by territorial rulers –  the orders that they be treated with ‘grace, cordiality, support and good will’51 –  into any sort of lasting rights. This was a major distinction between the Roma’s legal situation and that of Jews in a number of European countries.52 The 1551 imperial edict by the Diet of Augsburg was issued in response to the idea that ‘the Gypsies / who for various reasons have not been tolerated for a time / and are required to leave the lands of the German Nation / are now forcing their way back in again’.53 In addition, older agreements were annulled: ‘Procured passports / of all sorts of Gypsies / regardless of by whom they were issued are to be con scated, taken away and destroyed’.54

This edict intensi ed restrictions from the Freiburg Diet of 1498, which prohibited the lords of the various lands of the empire from providing security or assistance to Gypsies and ordered them to prohibit Gypsy commerce and trade.55 At the time, Emperor Maximilian I (1459–1519) was trying to organize a crusade against the Ottomans to bolster his own territorial interests, and accusations were repeatedly raised that Gypsies were Turkish ‘spies and scouts in Christian countries’.56 Later edicts such as the one issued by Count Karl von Hesse-Kassel in 1695 resort to wild accusations against ‘traitors to the land’ and ‘betrayers of Christianity’.57 Read carefully, this imperial edict was slightly different than ones issued later against vagrancy in general, which required ‘plausible charges’, i.e. reliable and demonstrable evidence. Concerning

Gypsies, the punitive codes of the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries knew no such legal niceties.

The political strategy behind the edicts and proclamations was transparent and crass, blunting their effectiveness: Gypsies, a tiny group, were simply lumped in with the marginalized underclasses of beggars, tricksters and people with ‘dishonourable’ professions with whom they allegedly shared economic interests and were connected in malevolent gangs. Such was the argument used by the 1709 mandate of the ‘honourable Franconia district’ that

The popular saying holds that there are no thieves without fences and our previous experience shows that the aforementioned people nd shelter and quarter almost everywhere but especially in poor inns and shepherds’ huts sheep pens isolated farms and among knackers, hangmen and henchmen rabble who now and again lay themselves down under the blankets.58

At the same time, Gypsies were associated with major threats such as invasions and plagues, which were not only worrisome but religiously explosive. Exaggerations, hearsay and out-and-out lies cast Roma as a danger as foreign as the Turks and as widespread as disease. The great epidemics that beset Germany after the Thirty Years War in 1666–7, 1709–13 and 1720–21 offered ample opportunities to demonize Gypsies and other transient groups, whose unmonitored mobility led many to suspect them of spreading disease. For this reason, in 1720, Saxony decided to intercept the ‘Gypsy hordes arriving from Thuringia’ at its border.59

The legend of the Gypsies’ fraternity with other socially marginalized groups overshadowed the fact that homelessness and transience were conditions forced upon them. No one suspected at the time that the mass poverty of ‘masterless’ men would be one of the decisive prerequisites for industrialization and capitalism in western Europe. Karl Marx (1818–83) described this process in Capital as the birth-pangs of modernity: ‘Hence at the end of the 15th and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout Western Europe a bloody legislation against vagabondage. The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as ‘voluntary’ criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own goodwill to go on working under the old conditions that

no longer existed’.60 It wouldn’t be until the eighteenth century that capitalists would discover the exploitation of the labour of untrained, uneducated people as a source of wealth. ‘Bloody legislation’ would yield to disciplinary programmes aimed at making such people t for division-of-labour production.

What was novel about the legislation against vagabonds was how it translated social exclusion into geographic space. Closed territories arose alongside closed societies. Social displacement meant that there was no longer any place61 for a ‘masterless rabble’,62 as a Prussian edict of 1725 made unmistakably clear:

We must note to our extreme dissatisfaction that despite all of our ordinances, edicts and mandates this accursed people have not come round. On the contrary, ignoring the deportations executed against them and the beatings with rods and brandings, individuals and sometimes even whole hordes have returned to our lands and again committed many iniquities and presumptuously malicious deeds against our true subjects.63

As a deterrent, some states erected on their borders so-called Gypsy signs and panels visually depicting for those who couldn’t read what punishments interlopers could expect. Those that survived depict people being beaten, branded and strung up on gallows.64

For Romani groups, survival from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century depended on how strictly and comprehensively the ‘bloody legislation’ was enforced – and not only in the economically backward, capitalism-resistant lands of eastern and southern Europe, whose way of life was determined by legal slavery that persisted until deep into the nineteenth century. Whereas corporative society reinforced and legally secured its territorial connections, marginalized groups were plunged into a maelstrom of administrative measures that vacillated between arrest and expulsion, welfare and forced labour, forced settlement and work prohibitions, ghettoization and human traf cking. Gypsies and other people from the lowest classes had no rights at all.

The most picaresque result of all this was the rise of robber gangs all over Europe.65 Mobility, voluntary and not, led to the literary genre of transients’ poetry,66 and vagrancy and criminality were the backdrop for the Gypsy stories, which attracted such great popular interest, rst in Spain and England, then in Germany and other European countries.

Even in the most charitable interpretation of the historical documents, and even though individual Roma were tolerated as soldiers, military musicians or ‘protected Gypsies’, it is clear that as a group they were often subject to expulsion and elimination.67 The early modern anti-Gypsy edicts translated an idea of who these people were into a legal and administrative language deeming them useless and harmful and demanding they be expelled from the social body. As such, the antiGypsy measures allowed authorities from village elders on up to the governments of various countries to institute increasingly severe punishments for concrete forms of behaviour, including putting people to death. In 1722, for instance, the Upper Rhine district ordered that, ‘man or woman, those branded O.C. on their backs must be hanged without exception, without any proof of any further crime, should they be caught re-entering the land’. The death sentences were to be carried out after the victims had been previously ‘pinched by glowing hot tongs’. An alternative was their execution ‘by being strapped alive to the wheel’.68 The small step from Gypsies’ ‘social death’ to their physical killing for violating one of the numerous edicts left hardly any room for them to pursue individual development, to say nothing of engagement in higher cultural activity. Conversely, when they did address the topic of Gypsies, literature and art in the period between the onset of modernity and the mid-eighteenth century typically and rather monotonously con ned itself to scenes of eeting encounters and crimes. Meanwhile, the threats to Romani lives, with which the lords of the land demonstrated their sovereign authority, were inscribed on victims’ bodies by branding, mutilation and other stigmata. The visibility of such stigmata prevented Roma from even ascending to the modest level of farmers or tradespeople and meant that others kept their distance from them. There was no duty to show kindness or humanity to people who had been branded. Paradoxically, stigmatization simultaneously foreshadows and postpones the act of execution, mandating a non-relationship that nonetheless doesn’t rule out a variety of everyday social contacts: from the exploitation of labour to the trade in illegally obtained goods. The more unmistakable the limitations and ineffectiveness of violent sanctions were, the more intense the ood of laws and ordinances became, reaching its high point in the rst half of the eighteenth century. The right to kill or pardon, to dispossess or shower with gifts, to admit or expel, which autocrats wielded at will and proclaimed in edicts and mandates, could

no more bring about peace in society than ‘measures for the elimination of such a malicious and damaging people, which are also very burdensome to the natives of this land’.69 All such measures accomplished was to create a climate of arbitrariness and disorder.

Policies towards Gypsies were the same in nearly all European countries, and the repertoire of punishments varied little either. In Sweden, King John III (1537–92) began his reign in 1568 with deportations but added forced labour in silver mines as of 1580.70 He also ordered the con scation of everything those arrested owned, depriving transient people of their very basis for existence – and creating a welcome source of income for low-level administrators.71 Another existential attack was forcibly separating parents from their children –  an early, still haphazard form of later systematic, socio-political measures that would persist until the late nineteenth century. Children left or kept behind after their parents were executed or deported were sent to orphanages, houses of correction or so-called ‘spinning houses’ where impoverished people were con ned and made to work, for example, at looms.72 Such unfortunate children were also sent to live with families of strangers so that they could be given ‘urgent instruction in Christianity and, when the time has come, be initiated into a trade in which they can earn their bread in more reliable fashion than their parents’.73 In some countries, Gypsies were declared to be ‘fair game’ for full-blown members of society to do with as they wished. In 1685, the duke of Braunschweig, Rudolph-August, published an edict forbidding ‘the vagabond Gypsies, or Tatars, as they are also known, from moving around’. In it, he declared them ‘fair game’, and declared that regardless of their motivations those who abused them ‘shall not be deemed to have sinned or committed an injustice’.74 The edict opened the door to all sorts of abuse. The consequences of such declarations were apparent as early as 1571 in Frankfurt am Main, when a man convicted of killing a Gypsy escaped all punishment because the victim was fair game.75 Around 1700, several regional rulers, including Leopold I of Bohemia, explicitly encouraged attacks on Gypsies. Likewise a vividly worded mandate from the principality of Nassau-Diez in 1723 allowed all residents ‘to immediately open re on [Gypsies], shoot them down and smite and beat them without anyone who shot or otherwise killed one or more of these thieves being considered to have acted wrongly, broken the law or made himself punishable in any way’.76 Another edict promised ‘a specie

of ducats for every one killed’.77 Declaring people fair game and stripping them of any protection under the law suspended one aspect of the feudal social hierarchy: everyone had a right to kill those excluded from it. Such edicts per diously inculcated the notion that the lives of people like Gypsies were worthless and that they thus enjoyed no rights. This allowed Christians –  in a Christian value system –  to treat ‘the least of these my brethren’ (Matthew 25) as creatures from hell.

The violence meted out upon Gypsies who had been declared fair game lived on in memories of ‘Gypsy hunts’, which outraged eighteenthcentury Enlightenment commentators. Johann Rüdiger, the author of the rst critical investigation of Romani origins and language, appears to have been the rst to write of them. ‘As little as forty years ago a mother and her infant were shot during a large-scale hunt by a provincial court in Rhineland.’78 This story was repeated by Heinrich Grellmann (1756–1804), who became known throughout Europe as a researcher on Gypsies.79 His version continues to be retold, with various, often contradictory embellishments, today, although no reliable sources for the story have ever been found. In 1866, Julius Ernst Födisch, in A history of Bohemia, drew comparisons with colonial genocide: ‘[The Gypsies] seem to have been shot down with the same cold-bloodedness as today’s enraged Yankees are hunting the nal remnants of the poor redskins in the primeval forests of North America. For example, a hunting report from a small German principality in 1700 lists along with the game killed a Gypsy and her infant as well.’80 Authors of cultural and historical conversation pieces also passed on the story, as did popular novelist Gustav Freytag (1816–95) in his widely read Pictures from the German Past. 81 In 1930, the Romanian-American writer Konrad Bercovici (1881–1961) revived a souped-up version of the narrative, enriched with gruesome details, in his book The Story of the Gypsies : ‘As late as 1826, Freiherr von Lenchen returned from one of these hunts with two valuable trophies: the head of a Gypsy woman and that of her child.’82

There is no incontrovertible proof that such ‘Gypsy hunts’ ever actually took place –  the story in question may well have con ated two separate incidents –  and it is hardly implausible that hunters may have accidentally shot Roma wandering through forests. Nonetheless, the archives do contain records of Gypsies being hounded in rural places, sometimes for several days at a time, and repeated injuries and deaths. In the absence of country gendarmes, rural authorities organized posses,

recruited in the villages, to apprehend people reported to have illicitly crossed borders or committed crimes or be residing illegally on native territory.83

Enlightenment activists who demanded professional and rational reforms in crime ghting rejected such practices as promoting barbarism, awakening dangerous passions and unleashing base instincts. The story of women and children being hunted down out of bloodlust or for sport became the most extreme example of anti-Gypsy persecution and the core of a discourse of victimhood, inspired by an empathy that had not been completely extinguished even when Gypsies were excluded from society. Early modern defenders of law and order, however, saw the situation completely differently. In their view, those of foreign heritage who led shady, dishonourable lives – ‘born of Gypsy parents, having moved around with Gypsies from childhood, married to Gypsies and knowing of no other way of life’84 –  were to be driven off and left to their fate, and that was all. In the interest of purifying society, it was legitimate to in ict violence on those who were believed to have sneaked into native society to in ict harm upon it. There were no limits to the exercise of force in such cases. The prevailing view was that those who died from persecution did so in the same unworthy fashion as they had lived. It’s all the more surprising, then, as Foucault noted when he examined denunciations by everyday people and other documents from this period, that in their encounters with marginalized groups, state authorities ‘that wished to annihilate them, or at least to obliterate them’,85 responded ‘in terms that appear no less excessive’.86 By describing its victims hyperbolically, emphatically and with such pathos, state power granted otherwise obscure, unremarkable, average gures an ‘appalling or pitiful grandeur’.87

A look at the anti-Gypsy edicts con rms Foucault’s analysis. With biblical fury, one edict ordered that ‘this reprobate and godless Gypsy rabble that subsists solely from robbing and stealing was removed by the roots and eradicated from all of our lands’,88 so that ‘our land may be cleansed of these vermin’.89 The edicts don’t speak in the language of dispassionate legalisms, but rather combine –  in archaic terms –  bans and expulsion with damnation and curses. Precisely this exaggeration and radicalization revealed how elementally afraid absolute authorities were of these foreigners. Their edicts ‘baptized’ Gypsies as infamous, worthless people in a performative act of naming. What Foucault terms

a rhetoric of the ‘abominable’ and a ‘discourse of invective and execration’90 were the means to this end. Such crude forms of damnation represented but a small part of a graded system of social dishonour, on the basis of which rights could be denied and punishments meted out. In feudal society, those without honour included not just people such as executioners or slaughterers who did ‘dishonourable jobs’, but also ‘unfree people and serfs as well as Jews, Turks, heathens, Gypsies and Wends who are ineligible for membership in the Christian community’.91 The shaming of the ‘those without honour’ was the ip side of the pompous glori cation of ‘noble souls’, especially in the age of absolutism. Even punishment is just a part of the staging of power aimed at rendering them ‘forever unworthy of the memory of men’.92 Punishment was in this sense the hell that followed the purgatory of infamy.

The imperial declarations, edicts, mandates and all the other legal documents represented a major phase in the invention of Gypsies and greatly in uenced how they were depicted in literature. The Gypsy would become a perennial standard gure in representations of the foreign and the infamous. Pernicious foreigners were not seen to have individual traits that would merit being explored. Instead, literary interest focused solely on their supposedly typical characteristics as representatives of a ‘reprobate and godless’, outcast and contemptible people. Foucault is correct to refer to legal and administrative documents as legends with ‘a certain ambiguity between the ctional and the real’.93 They didn’t record what actually was, but rather ‘the sum of what is said about it’.94 To extend Foucault’s logic, we could say that legal texts are inevitably constructed in a literary and aesthetic fashion. But it’s worth underlining that these legends concerning Gypsies and other infamous people constructed them as anything but saviours and heroes. ‘The discourse of power,’ Foucault writes, ‘produces monsters.’95

How can a whole people, from little children up to group leader, be condemned as infamous? In this regard, for the rst time, Roma could be compared to Jews,96 and most of their contemporaries had no doubts as to what to think about these two groups. In the widely read 1714 anti-Semitic pamphlet entitled ‘Jewish Peculiarities’, published in Frankfurt, the author didn’t neglect to include a section asking ‘whether [the Gypsies] descend from the Jews’.97 Although he answers that question in the negative with some long-winded, scholarly elucidations, he still uses

images of ‘an unworthy, wanton, riff-raff people’98 and a group of alien, non-assimilating, homeless immigrants for both Gypsies and Jews, although they were otherwise so very different. For starters, Jews’ religiously based historical self-consciousness is almost the opposite of the Roma’s lack of knowledge about their own origins. Furthermore, whereas anti-Semitism sought to denigrate the storied history of an ancient, cultured people, the obscure dark past of the Gypsies allowed observers to invent origins for them – as a pre-history of an infamous people.

The Mysteries of Origins

In a social order in which family origin decides who wields authority and possesses power, familial or tribal genealogies determine what positions people can and cannot achieve. In the Middle Ages, the prime example was royal dynasties, but in the early modern period, this rule also began to apply to entire peoples and nations. A worthy genealogy in uenced how various groups ranked within the world community. Humanistic chroniclers and polymath historians like Aventinus, who noted the Roma’s arrival in Europe, still naturally devoted far more attention to the origins of their own people.99 Before the advent of monumental eighteenth-century encyclopedias like Zedler’s Universal Lexicon (1749) in German-speaking Europe, scholars could idly speculate about Gypsy genealogy without risk of being called out. One exception was the respected Franciscan friar and religious pilgrim Niccolò da Poggibonsi, who asserted that they were the descendants of Cain, condemned for his crime to a ‘restless life of wandering’. He even proposed that if they ever settled in one place, Gypsies’ bodies would become ‘wormy and sick’.100 Such propositions exposed Poggibonsi to his colleagues’ ridicule. Theologist August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) wrote in his 1729 Rules for Life from the Holy Scripture : ‘When some people make the Gypsies into Cain’s descendants, as vagrant and fugitive as the tribal father and condemned to roam around in the world, they don’t know what they are talking about. After all, Cain’s whole family line perished in the Flood.’101 It was a standard humanist belief that ‘all the people of the globe’ were united by ‘their common, monogenetic descent from Noah’s family’,102 and scholars constantly came up with new interpretations of the Old Testament and Antique

historical writings to support this genealogy, starting with the tribes founded by Noah’s sons: Japheth in Europe, Sem in Asia and Ham/ Cham in Africa. These were human races whose existence early modern scholars believed that they could empirically prove.

Neither the Old Testament nor the historians of Antiquity ever mentioned Gypsies, aside from one obscure remark by Herodotus.103 In the biblical genealogy, Ham begat Cush/Kush, who – in the words of biblical historian Arno Borst – ‘stands for Ethiopia since being recognized by the rst-century Romano-Jewish historian Josephus . . . the descendants of Cush are the ve “Ethiopian” peoples in Arabia and around the Red Sea’.104 It seemed plausible to identify the Gypsies from ‘little Egypt’ as one of them. This notion also explains why scholars quit pursuing the etymological traces of the designation ‘Tatars’.105 Among Ham’s descendants were not only the African peoples, but monstrous beings populating the ends of the earth, about whom explorers like Marco Polo (1245–1324) and Mandeville reported and whose deformities were believed to be worthy of teratological study. Learned men of the day delighted in collecting such ‘curiosities’. Sebastian Münster’s 1544 Cosmographia still described a group of Gypsies he claims to have observed near Heidelberg in terms similar to end-of-the-world monsters.106

In the words of modern historian Alexander Perrig, Ham, who violated a taboo by shamelessly observing his naked, sleeping father, serves as ‘a general explanation for humans’ lack of civilization’.107 As descendants of Ham, Gypsies were also considered shameless, and Ham’s lack of civilization was grotesquely exaggerated and translated into the end-of-the-world monsters. Genealogies of whole people inevitably search for positive or negative family traits, inherited virtues and vices, historical callings and curses, as ways of de ning presentday ‘national character’.108

Ham was characterized by his magic powers, and it was speculated that Cush had been ‘blackened by a curse’109 – both notions that cohere with ideas about Gypsies. As a result, scholars like Ahasverus Fritsch (1629–1701) in 1662 assumed that ‘they have their beginnings in Cush, a son of pro igate Ham / and were born in Egypt / and were cursed by their forefathers / to wander about the entire world’.110 Jakob Thomasius (1622–84) put forth a somewhat different idea in his 1652 Dissertatio : ‘Cush, son of Ham, has been made the father not just of the Ethiopians and Moors, but also the Egyptians [Gypsies], although Cush’s