by Becky Taylor
Why . . . are we setting ourselves the impossible task of spoiling the Gypsies?. . . they stand for the will of freedom, for friendship with nature, for the open air, for change and the sight of many lands; for all of us that is in protest against progress . . . The Gypsies represent nature before civilisation . . . He is the last romance left in the world.5
The idea that Gypsies lived at one with nature was taken as given. Descriptions of them and their camps firmly located them in rural settings, using imagery stressing their similarity to the animal kingdom:
In summer time, these dusky wanderers might be seen encamped upon the commons, or on the sprawling borders of some quiet road, beneath a sheltering hedge . . . as free as the wild bird . . . gliding about the solitudes of the land, like half-tamed panthers.6
While these quotations were written by nominal supporters of Gypsies, there was a very fine – indeed sometimes invisible – line between this and the writings of those wishing to remove the ‘Gypsy problem’ from society:
The Gypsies (who are on the lowest scale of culture) should be looked upon as a community of children of nature who as yet have but a superficial knowledge of civilisation and who will long defer its adoption . . . Their volatile nature and inability to consider the future, their instability and restlessness, make any approach to even the lower forms of civilisation impossible . . . they have everywhere either remained untouched by civilisation or have adopted merely its worst forms.7
In this Gypsies were treated in a similar manner to Europe’s colonial subjects, where relations between colonizers and colonized were governed by two beliefs: firstly that with help and guidance those from less advanced civilizations could be brought up to the standard of the Christian West, and secondly the idea of a permanent physical difference between races, often emphasized by describing the colonized as animal-like and close to nature.
As we shall see, there was a jagged divide between these ideas and reality: Gypsy lifestyles differed widely across Europe, and could include long-term settlement rather than nomadism, everyday interactions with the wider population and involvement in mundane economic occupations, as well as ongoing adaptations to deal with the demands of state bureaucracies. In order to make sense of the disjuncture between the idea of ‘the Gypsy’ and reality, the racialization of Gypsies was given an extra twist. Fitting within the broader emergence of social Darwinist theories, the later nineteenth century saw the construction of a theory of the decline in the racial purity of Gypsies linked to their increased mixing and marrying with ‘degenerate’ members of the settled population. Gypsiologists developed a racial hierarchy that placed ‘pure-blooded’ Gypsies, who were believed to speak the best Romani, at the top; groups with varying proportions of Gypsy blood depending on which source one reads (didikais in England, Zigeunermischling in Germany) in the middle; and vagrants with no Romani ancestry at the bottom. This implied that while Gypsies were somehow racially suited to nomadism and so were capable of maintaining traditional codes of conduct, for vagrant dropouts and those of mixed blood this capacity was diminished or absent.8 So, from the mid-nineteenth century we see a number of gypsiologists and anthropologists using comparative anthropometric surveys – essentially measuring skulls and bodily proportions – in order to provide evidence for theories of the origins of Gypsies. The most systematic of these were the work of the anthropologist Eugene Pittard and, of course, that of the Nazis, led by Robert Ritter. Pittard, using the Gypsies of the Balkans as his base group, sought to find ‘les vrais Tziganes’ where:
Very fine men and very beautiful women are often found among them. Their swarthy complexion, jet-black hair, straight well-formed nose, white teeth, dark-brown wide open eyes, whether lively or languid in expression, the general suppleness of their deportment, and the harmony of their movements, place them high above many European peoples as regards physical beauty.9
For gypsiologists anxious to discover a Golden Age and a pure Gypsy culture, this outlook allowed them to pursue their pet theories, with any contradictory findings dismissed as the result of cultural pollution and miscegenation.10 Such scapegoating enabled gypsiologists to distance themselves from the squalid, urban encampments that existed around major cities, as well as any other elements that impinged on romantic notions of a rural Gypsy idyll. It was also useful to detractors of Gypsies, who could argue that they were simply dealing with racially less evolved groups, or ‘degenerate’ members of mainstream society, who needed to be dealt with firmly via new legislation, education, settlement programmes or perhaps the gospel. This idea of the dangers of mixed ancestry would support Nazi justifications for genocide, and also later twentieth-century refusals to acknowledge the place of nomadic lifestyles in modern Europe.
So, where does this leave us as historians in our search to understand our sources and the ‘right’ word to use? Firstly, we need to acknowledge our debt to the gypsiologists in terms of the sheer amount of sources they have made available to us over the past 150 years or so. Both in painstaking archival work and in meticulous accounts of Gypsy life and culture across Europe and sometimes beyond, we have a legacy of sources that is rich and valuable, and from which I have drawn repeatedly in writing this book. But we also have the legacy of their perspective: the assertions that the particular group recorded by ‘X’ were ‘true’ Gypsies; the dismissal of less picturesque groups as ‘half-breeds’; the often tortuous attempts to construct theories of how one particular Indian tribe migrated to Europe over centuries while remaining untouched by any of the societies through which they passed. Similarly reformers, in all their different guises, left a deep paper trail of schemes, theories and plans redolent with ideas of the racial difficulties presented in trying to settle down ‘nature’s nomads’.
Within all this debate it is now broadly accepted that early Romani groups originated in north-western India. From here they migrated westwards into Persia, intermixing and intermarrying and thereby loosely forming into a people known as the Dom, before moving further west within the expanding Ottoman and Byzantine empires and then into Europe in the medieval period.11 Within Europe migrations of Gypsies and Roma followed three major streams: whereas the majority settled within the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire, some headed to the autonomous principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, north of the Danube (in present-day Romania), while others gradually continued to migrate north and west. Ottoman tax registries suggest that early numbers were small, while fifteenth-century historical records from western Europe invariably describe Gypsies arriving in groups of between 50 and 300 individuals. Further mixing with pre-existing peripatetic groups within Europe even more complicated the pattern while, as we shall see, the practice of transportation to New World colonies and parts of Africa, as well as later voluntary migrations, ensured their further migration beyond Europe and across the Atlantic. Later, the early settled Roma population south of the Danube were superimposed upon by migrations from Wallachia and Moldavia of groups of runaway slaves during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Further population churning resulted from the abolition of Gypsy slavery, the mass migrations from southeastern Europe across the Atlantic during the late nineteenth century, while the twentieth century saw movements in response to the crises of the Second World War and the collapse of communism after 1989.12
Throughout all this it was rarely possible to decide with any certainty whether someone was a ‘Gypsy’. We know when others thought someone was a Gypsy, or perhaps a Sinti, Manouche, Irish Traveller or Romanian Roma, and we know what people thought about them. But all too often we have no way of knowing what they themselves thought, or how they would like to have been described. Consequently, with hesitations and caveats, when using historical material, I generally use the word ‘Gypsy’ in this book. Along with ‘Egyptian’ this was certainly the word most often used for the first few hundred years of their presence in Europe, so it seems most historically, if not socially, accurate. For more recent periods, and when I look in more
detail at particular national contexts, where it is possible to be more specific I use the word that is most appropriate for that country at that time. When I write about the most recent, and particularly political, developments within Europe I use Roma, as the most currently acceptable term. But here, as elsewhere when writing about history, we need to be aware that there is no one right answer.
Where to Begin?
It was scholars in the eighteenth century who made the links between Romani and the Indian group of languages, and this led to much effort being expended in the following century and a half to pinpoint exactly which tribe or from which region Gypsies originated. However, it should already be clear by now that the truth is rather more complex: to put it crudely, there was no one group of people who woke up one day in the sixth century in India and said, ‘Right, let’s start moving north and west. If we keep at it we should hit the Scottish coast by the early sixteenth century.’
While it is now accepted that the Romani people formed outside rather than inside India, what is rather less clear is the point at which we might meaningfully think of the people we are writing about as being ‘Gypsies’ rather than ‘people who might have had a similar lifestyle to and spoken a language connected to Romani’. Donald Kenrick, who has done more work than most on the subject, has described how constructing ‘the early history of the Romanies is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, when some of the pieces are missing and parts of another puzzle have been put in the same box’.13
This naturally presents historians, who are used to dealing with documentary evidence, with the challenges of using a combination of genetic and linguistic evidence in order to piece together the different routes taken by founder Romani groups in the migration from India to Anatolia and the Balkans. It is only after this point that we pick up the first certain documentary evidence of Gypsies.
Developments in DNA sampling have confirmed that proto-Gypsy groups originated in what is now north-western India and Pakistan, probably migrating from this region around 1,500 years ago, with movement to Anatolia and then the Balkans being relatively rapid.14 Further genetic work, backed up by linguistics and written sources, indicates that it was at this point, rather than before, that proto-Gypsy groups split: travelling through the Balkans and then spreading out relatively rapidly into northern and eastern Europe, and westwards through Germany, France and the Iberian peninsula. We find, for example, higher genetic mixing between Roma and non-Roma populations in the Balkans than in other parts of Europe, so that in Bulgaria 45 per cent of Roma show non-Romani genetic heritage, in contrast to 11 per cent in Lithuania. This supports the general documentary and historical evidence that Romani peoples have been present in the Balkans for far longer and consequently mixed more with local populations, whereas groups present further west have mixed less with surrounding peoples. In turn this contradicts the stereotype of Gypsies and Roma being a closed, ‘secret people’, only interacting and marrying within their own kind. Rather, genetics, as well as linguistics and, as we shall see over the course of this book, history indicate that social rules and practice by the Roma varied across time and space according to different social constraints and opportunities.15
If this is the broad genetic evidence, what of comparative linguistics? Linguists use evidence of the number of shared or ‘loan’ words, as well as grammatical structure, as a guide to determining the relationship between different language groups, as well as suggesting how long different populations might have been in contact. Put simply, the greater the social contact and the longer the period of contact, the more shared words and grammatical structure there will be. However, it is vital to remember that at the same time as accepting how linguistics might provide insights into the migration paths, we must make no simplistic connection between genetic history and the specific language one speaks. After all a random sample of Americans, to take an example, might contain people with German, Czech, African, Asian and Native American ancestry who are all native English speakers.16
This is not the place to go into the possible linguistic roots of Romani within India itself, which remains a complex and contested area.17 Greek, Welsh and Kalderash Romani all exhibit strong links with Sanskrit and Hindi, sharing more than 500 basic words, and experts have concluded that Romani does not exhibit any of the changes that took place in Indian languages after circa 1000. This suggests that Romani as a broad language formed either within the Indian subcontinent or in the early period of migration.18 However, after this point matters rapidly dissolve into uncertainty: it is possible to point to a number of loan words from Persia, as well as a far larger number from Armenian, suggesting that early Gypsy groups were located for a significant period of time in the Armenian Empire that sat between the Caspian, Black and Mediterranean seas.19 There is no direct evidence to explain how or why groups entered Armenia, nor why they may have left, although migration from there into present-day Turkey is likely to have been prompted by the decline of the Persian Empire and the expansion of the Seljuks from the east in the late tenth century. It was their continuous raiding of the Armenian population that created a flow of migrants westwards into the Byzantine Empire, resulting in the creation of a far smaller Armenian kingdom in Cicilia, in modern-day southern Turkey, at the end of the eleventh century.20
Reaching the Mediterranean
While we know that a movement of early Romani peoples from India must have taken place, there remains no definitive evidence of a distinctive ‘Gypsy’ identity – coalescing around language and possibly also nomadism – until Anatolia under the control of first the Seljuks and then the Byzantines. Even after this it is hard to be certain what we are looking at: ‘Too often the assumption has been made, in looking for traces of Gypsies, that any reference to a migrant group pursuing a Gypsy-like occupation can for that reason be equated with them.’21 So, while by the time we enter the Byzantine Empire towards the end of the first millenium we are on slightly firmer ground when it comes to considering the early history of Gypsies, we still need to be wary of early documents that apparently refer to them and their economic activities.
The ambiguity centres around the translation of the word ‘Atsingani/Atsinganos’ (derived from the Greek ατσίγγανοι/ atsinganoi), which became the word used by the Byzantines to describe heathens, after the name of a heretical iconoclastic sect that had a reputation for fortune telling and magic and which practised a number of cleanliness taboos.22 The generally accepted theory is that this word forms the base of a number of European words for Gypsies – Tsigani (Croatian), Tsiganes (French), Zigeuner (Dutch, German) – and consequently references to ‘Atsingani’ are taken by most scholars as reference to early Romani groups within Byzantium.23 The difficulty with this is distinguishing between references to ancestors of Gypsies and those simply relating to the original Atsingani. So, for example, in 803 a group referred to as Atsingani apparently used magic in order to quell a riot and were rewarded with permission to move freely throughout the empire.24
We have no way of knowing whether or not this refers to ancestral Gypsies, as with an eleventh-century account stemming from Constantinople. There, in 1050 Emperor Constantine Monomachus wanted to exterminate all the wild animals that had invaded the imperial park and were eating its game. In order to carry this out the emperor employed ‘a Sarmatian people, descendants of Simon the Magician, named Adsincani, who were renowned sorcerers and villains’.25 They destroyed the beasts by leaving pieces of meat ‘in places frequented by them endowed with magical properties, which, when eaten, killed them instantly’. It is tempting both to attribute the ‘magic’ to poison, and also to see this as the first confirmed recording of Gypsies in Constantinople. However, there are no other contemporary accounts referring to Adsincani or Astingani, and in fact we need to wait more than 150 years, until the early twelfth century, in order to have consistent and reliable evidence.
Referring to Athinganoi (Atsingani) in a general text discussing the excommunication of people accu
sed of showing animals for entertainment or telling fortunes to the naive, canonist Theodore Balsamon noted that they ‘would have snakes wound around them, and they would tell one person that he was born under an evil star, and the other under a lucky star; and they would also prophesy about forthcoming good and ill-fortunes’.26 He also wrote about them in relation to ventriloquism: ‘Ventriloquists and wizards are all those who are inspired satanically and pretend to predict the unknown [such] as . . . the Athinganoi, the false prophets, the “hermits” and others.’ As there is no evidence of the iconoclastic Athinganoi surviving beyond the persecutions of the early tenth century, it is reasonable to believe that the ‘Athinganoi’ referred to here may be Gypsies. And if we accept that references to Athinganoi, Adsincani or Atsingani in Byzantine documents from the eleventh century onwards relate to Gypsy groups, then it becomes possible to chart something, if not of their lives, then at least of their livelihoods. Late thirteenth-century directions to the parishioners of Constantinople forbade them to associate with fortune tellers, bear keepers and snake charmers and ‘especially not to allow the Gypsies to enter their homes, because they teach devilish things’. Writings from the following century and a half also place Gypsies in the same bracket as fortune tellers – with the women being particularly singled out for mention – and also magicians, or those engaged in sorcery, as well as acrobats and jugglers.