by Becky Taylor
The tax registers also recorded the occupations of the Gypsies. In the register of 1523 they were most often recorded as musicians while, despite the long-standing link between Gypsies and various forms of metalworking, very few are shown as working in this field: only one blacksmith is registered, and only four ironworkers. However, if we cast the net more broadly, we can see that there were also tinsmiths, farriers, sword makers, stove and clout nail makers and ironmongers listed. If anything, what emerges is a remarkable diversity of occupations pursued by Gypsies. The lists mention a range of craft occupations, including shoe and slipper makers, leatherworkers, tailors, carpet makers, dyers; food-related occupations, such as halva, kebab and cheese makers and butchers; as well as sundry occupations ranging from gardeners, monkey breeders, well-diggers, prison guards, servants and muleteers. There is also evidence of Gypsies working in positions higher up the social scale and within positions of authority: the 1523 returns include army officers, janissaries, policemen, doctors, surgeons and monks.42
Recent research has opened up the possibility that many of the nomadic Gypsies at this time were participating in seasonal agricultural work, suggesting a reciprocal relationship between them and the wider population.43 Similarly close ties seem to have developed as a result of the various military obligations they held as muselem towards the state.44 These were often discharged via employment as military blacksmiths, but sometimes also through engagement in military road construction and repair work during military campaigns, as well as the provision of food and the positioning of cannons during battle. In return for these services, as with other craftsmen, muselem received either a salary or tax concessions, and the position became hereditary in nature.45 As they were tied to what were anyway fairly mobile military forces, we cannot make an easy equation between their presence in a fort and a sedentary lifestyle. Indeed, this suggests a blurring of boundaries between Gypsies and other auxiliary workers tied to the military: mobility was part of life in the Ottoman Empire where craft positions were often fulfilled by immigrant groups.
The Ottoman tax system does not simply provide us with a description of the emerging society of the Balkans under its control, it was also central to creating the new society. By developing distinct tax obligations for different social groups the Ottomans both tapped into pre-existing community structures and formalized them. Crucially, unlike in western Europe where a nomadic lifestyle was typically assumed to be intrinsically resistant to state intervention, within the Ottoman Empire it was regarded as simply another way of life, whose adherents were deemed to owe certain obligations to the state. Such an attitude towards nomadism meant that, rather than being seen as practically and socially outside the Ottoman community, they were treated as a distinct but intrinsic part of it. Consequently, while both legislation and bureaucratic practices set certain limitations and regulated nomadic lifestyles they were not specifically designed to force either settlement or integration.46 Essentially, within Ottoman territory all the lands were deemed property of the Empire and, while some parts of it were owned personally by the sultan or religious institutions, the greater part was divided into fiefdoms shared out among members of the military officer class. Within this feudal system responsibility for collecting taxes was devolved to key individuals in each area or community, including nomadic groups. Such groups were divided into communities of roughly 50 tax payers with a designated head who was required to deliver the taxes each year. Being nomadic no more excluded Gypsies from the Ottoman tax system than it did other nomadic ethnic groups such as the cattle-herding Yürüks or the Tatars.
In 1530 a crucial decree was enacted. The ‘Law for Gypsies in the Rumelia’ set out the obligations of Gypsies to the state, and shows how this was intimately bound up with religion. Its importance lies in demonstrating how, as with all Ottoman subjects, a central distinction was made between Muslims and Christians, and how a further distinction was made between Gypsies and the rest of the population. Throughout the Ottoman Empire Muslims were taxed more lightly than non-Muslims, who were required to pay the cizye, a tax exclusively imposed on them ‘to demonstrate their inferiority’.47 Uniquely, Gypsy communities fell outside of both these categories, with both Muslim and Christian Gypsies obliged to pay Gypsies the cizye. This shows how they were seen as separate from the broader Muslim community and consequently, as far as tax and social status was concerned, there was no sharp distinction in the official mind between Muslim and Christian Gypsies. And yet, while both had to pay the cizye, they did not pay at the same rates: the decree of 1530 set the rate for Muslim Gypsies at 22 akçes and that for non-Muslim Gypsies at 25 akçes.48
The law also gives us an insight into the way in which, for Gypsies, the sancak (community) functioned as a political and administrative unit encompassing Muslim and non-Muslim Gypsies and both settled and nomadic households. It was headed by the çingene beği, or ‘Gypsy sancak chief’, who collected taxes from the community on behalf of the Sultan and was responsible for relations between the community and the state.49 In effect he acted as the tax collector, magistrate and intermediary between the community and the authorities:
The Gypsies who stray from their judicial district and hide in other districts as well as in backyards, are to be found, admonished, strictly punished and brought back to their district. The finding and returning of Gypsies who stray from their community is entrusted to the leaders of their companies and to their village mayors . . . [so that] they are present and do not hide their whereabouts when taxes are due to the Sultan or special taxes have to be paid.50
Any fines imposed by the Gypsy sancak on his community could be kept by him, consequently giving him a strong incentive to implement the laws of the Empire. As well as being drawn into the Ottoman state through the implementation of its tax requirements and the judicial process, the sancak leaders were expected to fulfil certain military obligations. The 1530 law details how the leaders from the Nikopol and Nish regions were required to serve in the Nikopol and Smederevo regions respectively, with the other leaders serving in the Pasha region. The resulting mix of obligation and privilege bestowed on the sancak leaders which emerges from this document demonstrates very well the ways in which the Ottomans adapted their feudal institutions in order to draw in even the most marginal communities within their territories.
THIS IS A GOOD MOMENT to step back and reflect not only on the emerging position of Gypsies in the societies in which they lived, but the nature of those societies themselves. Already we can see how, far from being separate from society, the migration of early Gypsy groups from India, and indeed their formation as an ethnic group as far as we can tell, was intimately tied to the expansion and contraction of empires: Persian, Seljuk, Byzantine, Venetian and Ottoman. Even strong empires have to work with their peripheries, local elites and frontier groups to maintain compliance, resources, tribute and military cooperation and ensure political coherence and stability. Imperial structures manipulated local elites, drawing them into their bureaucratic structures in order to maintain control in the furthest reaches of their empires. In this vein the Ottoman Empire, through how it dealt both generally with nomadic groups and Gypsies specifically, demonstrated an ability to absorb diverse populations and to create new institutions:
Ottomans negotiated between the contradictory, yet also complementary, visions and organisational forms of urban and rural; nomadic and settled; Islamic and non-Muslim; Sunni Muslims, Shi’ites and Sufi sects; scribes and poets; artisans and merchants; peasants and peddlers; and bandits and bureaucrats.51
Within such a diverse society, through using the millet, ethnic, racial and religious categories were deployed in order to make administrative tasks easier for the authorities. At the same time this system allowed the separate communities the space to develop distinctive identities. This entailed a very different world view to the one we will encounter in the emerging nation states of Europe in the early modern and modern periods. This is not to argue that these communit
ies were all seen as equal: as the tax system demonstrated, across the empire Muslims were given preference, while both Muslim and Christian Gypsies were accorded low status. Nevertheless, the everyday practicalities of ruling vast territories meant that compromises had to be reached that allowed different communities to negotiate space for themselves.52 Such freedom was not always liberatory, and could cause specific local practices of oppression to emerge, such as slavery and deep forms of serfdom.
So far the picture we have of Gypsies under both the Ottoman and the Venetian empires suggests that, while they were perceived as different, they were not seen as exceptional. They were fully integrated into their administrative structures, and undertook a wide range of economic activities from metalworking and seasonal agricultural labour to military functions and even petty official roles. They were present in the countryside and towns, often living alongside the wider population, with no clear division between nomadic and settled ways of life. Sometimes mobile and present in forts, ports and trading towns as well as remote areas they were perhaps better placed than many to understand that life was larger than was often apparent to the average inhabitant of the late medieval world. As we move now into western Europe on the cusp of the early modern period what is perhaps most striking is how rapidly this diversity of Gypsy experience and lifestyle became condensed into one stereotype: that of the wandering nomad.
ONE
Out of the Medieval World
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF GYPSIES across the Balkans by the late fourteenth century created one of the long-standing centres of Romani culture. More than this, it also laid the foundations for an understanding of European cultures: the Balkans already contained a mix of Christians, Muslims and Jews; those living in Modon, and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean, would have been familiar with pilgrims on their way to and from Jerusalem; and through everyday economic and social interactions Gypsies communicated with different populations and had an understanding of how other cultures worked. It is worth emphasizing these points because so much of the evidence of the first interactions of Gypsies with European cultures seemingly focuses on their separateness, their foreignness and their inherent ungovernability.
We do not know why in the first decades of the fifteenth century Gypsies started being recorded in central and western Europe. While the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into the Balkans, as well as the population changes caused by the plague in the mid-fourteenth century, formed something of the backdrop to their movements, we need to be aware of the effect of Gypsies extending their migratory routes further north and west, finding new opportunities and economic niches on the way. The reality is that, despite centuries of speculation, there is no hard evidence. But what we do know from their lives under the Ottomans and Venetians is that Gypsies had a number of strategies at their disposal with which to negotiate the new territories they were entering. Key to their success in any new place was to make themselves explicable to the populations they encountered. However, while the tools and strategies they developed under the Ottomans may well have been translatable into the world of late medieval Europe, Gypsies had the misfortune of arriving at a time when these ways were becoming out of date and being replaced by a rather harsher climate. Coming from the multi-ethnic and flexible practices of the eastern Mediterranean they entered a world that was increasingly inclined to construct boundaries between places, people and religious groups.
Although no period of history is static, the arrival of Gypsies into western Europe in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries coincided with a period of profound uncertainty and change. The medieval world had been fundamentally centred on a universal church and religious view that regulated and ordered life on earth as much as it propagated a particular approach to heaven. However, this gradually dissolved and with it institutions, attitudes, understandings and practices all changed profoundly over the fifteenth and particularly the sixteenth centuries. The process of religious fragmentation through the Reformation after 1517 and then the reassertion of Catholicism after the Council of Trent (1545–63) via the Counter-Reformation interplayed with the emergence of nation states. Britain, France and Spain consolidated their internal territories at the same time as embarking on new overseas empires in the Americas; Protestant cities and states – most notably the Netherlands in its Eighty Years War (1568–1648) against Spain – fought for religious and political freedom from Catholic influence; while the process of creating Protestant churches and congregations shifted balances of power and allegiances at local as much as national and international levels. To add to the political and religious uncertainties of the period the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries saw population growth, rising prices and falling wages and agrarian dislocation, all of which fed into increasing migration and urbanization. It is no surprise then that the early modern period contained a number of complex and protracted conflicts – the French wars of religion, the revolt of the Netherlands, the Thirty Years War – as well as new ideas about and responses to poverty, vagrants, outsiders and belonging.1
And into this contested material and spiritual terrain arrived the Gypsies. Not en masse, but rather in dribs and drabs over the course of the fifteenth century: first recorded in Germany in 1417, France in 1419, Switzerland and parts of Italy in 1422, Spain in 1425 and the Low Countries by 1429. They did not cross the North Sea or English Channel until far later, with the first definite record of their presence in Scotland dating from 1505 and in England not until 1514.2 So how were these strangers received? What did people make of them, and how did the societies of early modern Europe understand their way of life and presence in their towns and countryside?
To begin to understand how they were received both initially and over the subsequent decades we need to place the multitude of arrival stories recorded by contemporaries in the context of the messy and contested world of early modern Europe. Arriving when they did, the ways in which they were assimilated into, or marginalized from, the European societies through which they travelled has to be seen as a process: they were not encountering state and social systems set in stone, but rather interacting with the emerging societies and mechanisms of early modern states. Arguably what we can see over the first century after Gypsies appeared in western Europe is a profound shift in thinking in which medieval understandings of outsiders were replaced by harsher early modern ones.
At first glance it appears that the appearance of groups of Gypsies, with their dark skin and silver earrings, in towns across western Europe in the fifteenth century, presented a spectacle of utter foreignness. And indeed, contemporary accounts emphasized their exotic appearance and strange practices, as in the case of the reactions of the Parisians who came to see the group of around 100 Gypsies who arrived in August 1427 and were accommodated at St Denis.3 Their visit was recorded by a ‘Parisian Bourgeois’, who reported people coming from all over the city to see people he described thus:
The men were very dark, with curly hair; the women were the ugliest you ever saw and darkest, all with scarred faces and hair as black as a horse’s tail, and their clothes were very poor . . . an old coarse piece of blanket tied at the shoulder . . . [with a] wretched smock or shift. . . . I must say I went there three or four times to talk to them and could never see that I lost a penny, nor did I see them looking into anyone’s hands, but everyone said they did . . . [and this palmistry] brought trouble into many marriages.4
And yet, while clearly novel in many ways, rather than seeing these early groups of Gypsies as utterly incomprehensible to the populations of Paris and the other centres they visited, we can rather see them as part of a continuum of strangers encountered by the people of early modern cities. Despite the long-standing image of late-medieval Europe as essentially static, with individuals tied throughout their lives to one particular place, in fact for many movement and migration were an intrinsic part of everyday experience.5 Between the commercial revival of the thirteenth century and the end of the middle ages, the
transport of goods became quicker and easier and generally safer, with trains of pack animals being replaced by two-wheeled and then four-wheeled wagons run by professional carriers organized from a network of inns that provided warehousing and packing facilities. While this was perhaps most noticeable in northern Italy, where works were often undertaken by the expanding city states, it was also a feature in more remote areas, and was driven by expanding trade that made improvements in the widths and surfaces of the roads and the building of countless bridges economically attractive.6 Improved travel networks, while mainly pushed by trade, benefited other travellers too, so that alongside merchants and traders on the road were a medley of what the Germans termed fahrende Leute (moving people), who included wandering scholars, minstrels and travelling entertainers, knife grinders, travelling healers, hawkers and tinkers. And of course travelling alongside – and sometimes with – these groups were pilgrims following well-trodden national and international routes to sites of religious importance.