NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF THE "GITANOS."

The mysterious Rommany race which overruns every nation in Europe, but intermingles with none, has always abounded in Spain, and particularly in Andalucia, a land which is peculiarly favourable to the Ishmaelitish propensities of these human pariahs—as congenial to predatory wild men as to the wild beasts we elsewhere describe. Thoroughly typical objects both on the byeways and deserts of Spain, and of the animated scenes at her rural feasts and fairs, to which the gypsies flock like vultures to a carcase, it would be inappropriate here to omit all mention of this singular race, even though it may be impossible for us to add anything new to the exhaustive description of the Spanish gypsy narrated by Borrow in "The Zincali," a work based on intimate acquaintance with the gitanos and their language. To it we are indebted for much historic and ethnological information respecting the gypsy race, and take the liberty of quoting two or three passages from its pages.[55]

First appearing on Spanish soil during the early decades of the fifteenth century, after being driven from land to land, the Zingari outcasts speedily found a congenial home—if such a term is applicable to nomadic vagabonds—amidst the lone and sparsely-peopled regions of Iberia.

Whence they had originally come—whether from Egypt, as they themselves averred and as their Spanish name imports, or from India, as the term Zincali indicates—it is not our intention to inquire.[56] Suffice it that nearly five centuries ago, this invasion of tinkers, horse-thieves, sorcerers, and all-round rogues poured into Europe, and during the long period that has since elapsed have maintained themselves there—not, it is true, in luxury, rather in rags and apparent poverty—by means of robbery and deceit, at the expense of the various peoples upon whom, as a swarm of wasps or locusts, they have thought good to descend. All this time, too, they have maintained intact both their racial individuality, their peculiar language, and their inveterate habits of lying and thieving.

"Who are these gitanos?" querulously asks the learned Lorenzo Palminero more than three hundred years ago ("El Estudioso Cortesano," AlcalÁ, 1587). "Who are these Gitanos? I answer: these vile people first began to show themselves in Germany in the year 1417, where they call them Tartars, or Gentiles; in Italy they are termed Ciani. [In Spain the Arabs (Moors) knew the gypsies by only one name, charami = thieves.] They pretend that they come from Lower Egypt, and that they wander about as a penance, and to prove this they show letters from the King of Poland. They lie, however, for they do not lead the lives of penitents, but of dogs and thieves. A learned person [himself] in the year 1540 prevailed upon them, by dint of much persuasion, to show him the King's letter, and from it he gathered that the time of penance had already expired. He spoke to them in the Egyptian tongue. They said, however, as it was a long time since their departure from Egypt, they could no longer understand it. He then spoke to them in the vulgar Greek, such as is used at present in the Morea and Archipelago. Some understood it, others did not, so that as all did not understand it, we may conclude that the language they use is a feigned one, got up by thieves for the purpose of concealing their robberies, like the jargon of blind beggars."

From their earliest appearance in Spain the roving bands of the Rommany were found to be a public nuisance; but so rapidly grew the evil weed and took root in the soil, that by the middle of the fifteenth century the gypsies had established a rudely-organized system of violence, robbery and roguery from Biscay to the Mediterranean. The country roads were unsafe, infested with dark-skinned highwaymen; while rural districts were subjected to wholesale depredation, bands of these outcasts settling themselves in the adjacent hills, wastes, or forests, whence they plundered and virtually beleaguered the sparse and defenceless villages of all the country around. Once established amidst the sierras and wildernesses, it was no easy matter to dislodge them, or even to hold them in check. Spain has ever been a land of the guerilla—little war—and of the guerillero; and the gypsies, though by no means a warlike race, were not lacking in courage and in those qualities of hardihood and dash which constitute the most dangerous guerilleros. They possessed, moreover, the strength of union, an Ishmaelitish bond of brotherhood which held the outlaws together, while dividing them as by a great gulf from the peoples amidst whom they had come to dwell. They had also their secret language. Neither civil nor military power could make itself effective against "Will-o'-the-wisps," who are here to-day, gone to-morrow, whose homes were the forest-thicket and mountain-cave, who, with their fast and trusty horses and donkeys (their "stock-in-trade") could transport their whole tribe in dead of night to distant places with a speed almost equal to that of the wild beasts of the sierras, to whom they were so near akin.

The nominal employment of the gypsies was that of tinkers, workers in iron, and horse-traffickers: under which guise they really subsisted by cattle-lifting and horse-stealing, either by force, or fraud, according as circumstances might suggest. The female gypsies, or gitanas, more than doubled the ill-gotten gains of their husbands by the arts of sorcery and divination, by selling charms and love-philtres, stealing by legerdemain, and exercising the various branches of what are termed the "occult sciences"—in other words, practising upon the silly credulity of the weaker portion of humanity—as well as by other and more loathsome avocations. The credulity of their victims appears incredible, though it is hardly less marvellous than the tact and effrontery displayed by the gypsy women in their cozening and charlatan tricks. Their knowledge of human nature and how to reach its weak points, was remarkable in a race so low, so degraded, and wholly illiterate. They possessed the cunning and boldness of the wild beast, and combined with it a hatred of the "BusnÉ," or Gentile, which the wild beast has not.

The bitterness of hatred which was cherished by the gitanos towards all of gentile race, appears incomprehensible, unless it springs from some old-time "first cause," the nature of which is long forgotten. Treacherous, cruel and vindictive, they had the wit to conceal their ill-will beneath soft words, and thus obtained means of committing atrocities against the "gentile," the records of which make one shudder.

Amongst the various devices employed by the gitanos to plunder their victims, may be mentioned the following:—

Hokkano Baro.—The great trick, or swindle, varying from the "confidence trick" in its multifarious forms, up to the boldest and most barefaced deceptions, often on a grand scale.

La Baji, or, in Spanish, buena ventura.—Fortune-telling, by chiromancy, necromancy, and other divinations.

Ustilar Pastelas.—Stealing by legerdemain or sleight of hand.

Querelar Nasela.—The evil eye.

Drao = poison.—Both these latter devices were employed to produce epidemics among men or flocks, when the reputed medical or veterinary skill of the gitanos was called into requisition; and, being aware of the origin of the disease, they seldom failed to effect its cure.

The gitanos were, and are divided into two classes: one section have more or less settled colonies in the Spanish towns and cities, where they dwell in quarters apart from the natives, known as gitanerias, wherein they ply their trade of tinkers, horse-dealers and shearers, sorcerers, and general thieves; and from whence, in pursuance of their inveterate vagabondism, they sally forth from time to time to attend distant fairs and markets to dispose of their stolen goods; and, as occasion arises, to perpetrate fresh crimes. The other section is more exclusively nomadic, roaming at large over the wilds of Spain, having no home save the shelter of forest or sierra, and to some extent actually migratory.

The daily life of the Spanish gypsy has always been characterized by a squalor and degradation exceeding that of the residuum of any European nation. They appear to have been devoid of the faintest conception of religion beyond that undefined sense of superstition which is common to savage races all over the world, or to possess any sense of morality, decency, or self-respect. Their food was of the foulest—they shrank not from carrion, and have been accused, apparently not without reason, of cannibalism, for which in early days many a gitano swung from the gibbet. Male and female alike, they were adepts at devilry and crime of every degree, yet amidst such a category of evil, they still possessed the one singular virtue of esteeming purity in their women. We quote the following picture of life in a gitaneria from Borrow ("Zincali," i., p. 76 et seq.):—"The gitanerias at even-fall were frequently resorted to by individuals widely differing in station from the inmates of these places—we allude to the young and dissolute nobility and hidalgos of Spain. The gypsy women and girls were the principal attraction to these visitors. Wild and singular as these females are in their appearance, there can be no doubt, for the fact has been frequently proved, that they are capable of exciting passions of the most ardent kind, particularly in the bosoms of those who are not of their race, which passion of course becomes the more violent when the almost utter impossibility of gratifying it is known. No females in the world can be more licentious in word or gesture, in dance and song, than the gitanas, but there they stop; and so of old, if their titled visitors presumed to seek for more, an unsheathed dagger or gleaming knife speedily repulsed those who expected that the gift most dear among the sect of the Roma was within the reach of a BusnÉ.

"Such visitors, however, were always encouraged to a certain point, and by this and various other means the gitanos acquired connections which frequently stood them in good stead in the hour of need. What availed it to the honest labourers of the neighbourhood, or the citizens of the town to make complaints to the Corregidor respecting thefts and frauds committed by the gitanos when perhaps the sons of that very Corregidor frequented the nightly dances at the gitanerÍa, and were deeply enamoured of some of the dark-eyed singing girls? What availed complaints when perhaps a gypsy sybil, the mother of those very girls, had free admission to the house of the Corregidor at all times and seasons, and spa'ed the buena ventura of his daughters, promising them counts and dukes, or Andalucian knights in marriage, or prepared philtres for his lady by which she was always to reign supreme in the affections of her husband? And above all, what availed it to the plundered to complain that his mule or horse had been stolen when the gitano robber, perhaps the husband of the sybil and the father of the black-eyed Gitanillas, was at that moment actually in treaty with my lord the Corregidor himself, to supply him with some splendid, thick-maned, long-tailed steed at a small price, to be obtained, as the reader may well suppose, by an infraction of the laws? The favour and protection which the gitanos experienced from persons of high rank is alluded to in the Spanish laws, and can only be accounted for by the motives above detailed."

By the middle of the fifteenth century the bands of the Rommany had become a serious danger in rural Spain, and their ability to act daringly in concert was demonstrated by their attempt to massacre the whole populace and sack the town of LogroÑo. That town at the moment was stricken down by a pestilence, which it was more than suspected had been caused by the Zincales themselves having poisoned with their drao the springs whence LogroÑo was supplied with water. Already, before the gypsy assault, the greater part of the populace had perished of the disease, and the annihilation of the survivors was only averted by the singular foresight and energy of one man—Francisco Alvarez. This Alvarez in his early life was said to have been admitted to the community of a gitano tribe, to have married a daughter of its chief, and eventually to have become the chief himself. Around the details of the affair hangs some uncertainty; but the historic fact that the gitanos actually attempted the massacre and plunder of a considerable Spanish town has been well attested, among others by Francisco de CÓrdova on his "Didascalia" (Lugduni, 1615).

The beginning of the seventeenth century saw the evil still on the increase, despite repressive measures. Bands of these human fiends, many hundreds strong, roamed over the highlands of Castile and Arragon, and were only dispersed, after plundering and devastating the country, when sufficient military force had at length been collected. The gypsies speedily searched out the richest provinces of the land—New Castile, La Mancha, Estremadura, Murcia, Valencia and Andalucia, and troubled but little the poor, wild, mountain-regions of the Asturias, Galicia, and the hill-country of Biscay.

The impunity with which these people set at nought during hundreds of years the successive laws which were enacted for their repression, is a curious point in connection with their history. As early as 1499, Ferdinand and Isabella, at Medina del Campo, interdicted, under heavy penalties, their vagrant propensities; ordered them to find fixed occupations, and to settle in the different towns and villages within a short specified period. In default they were to be expelled from Spanish soil. This act was confirmed and supplemented with more vigorous penalties by Charles I. at Toledo in 1539, and again by Philip II. in 1586, at Madrid.

By an enactment of Philip IV. at Madrid, 1633, the former laws were confirmed, but in order still further to penalize the profession and race of gypsies, their dress, their language, and even the name of gitanos, were declared illegal, and suppressed under pain of servitude in the galleys, or banishment. The gypsies were forbidden to form colonies or tribes, to intermarry, or to trade at markets and fairs; while the local authorities were commissioned to "hunt them down, take and deliver them," even beyond the boundaries of their respective jurisdictions. Still further legal fulminations against the gypsies were promulgated by Charles II. in 1692 and 1695, but all alike proved futile.

Similarly Philip V., in 1726, again increased the penalties on gitanismo, banishing the sect from Madrid and other royal cities, and in 1745, by a yet fiercer edict, he directed that they were to be "hunted down with fire and sword; that even the sanctity of the temples was to be invaded in their pursuit, and the gitanos dragged from the horns of the altar, should they flee thither for refuge."

Such, during three centuries (1499-1788), was the set policy of Spain towards her gypsy population. They were a proscribed race, treated as aliens and outlaws, forbidden to intermarry, and their very name, dress, and language were interdicted under severe penalties. Yet in spite of it all the gypsies continued to flourish, to increase in numbers, and to ply their customary trades of thieving, sorcery, and the rest, without the slightest check.

Whether under any circumstances these repressive measures were or were not the means best calculated to attain the object in view, it is at least certain that their failure was assured beforehand by the negligent way in which they were put in force; or rather by the fact they were never put in force at all. The gypsies, and especially the females, as we have already mentioned, by virtue of their divinations and certain other services which they rendered to the upper and ruling classes of Spain, had secured friends, or at least neutrals, amongst the very people in whose hands lay the administration of the laws. They were thus able to annul, and even to ridicule, the successive legal enactments formulated to exterminate them.

Among the various reasons for the remarkable vitality of the Rommany sect in thus surviving centuries of oppression, there stand out prominently the strong tribal cohesion inter se of the Zincali: their marriage customs and the aversion with which they regarded any alliance with the BusnÉ, or Gentile. A gitano might, in rare instances, marry a Spanish female, but in no case did a gitana consent to take a husband outside her own race. Thus the errate—the "black blood" of the Rommany, on which above all they prided themselves, was preserved uncontaminated. Whether, had the repressive laws been vigorously carried out, they would have met with better results, is an open question.

At length, in 1783, a fresh departure in policy was inaugurated by Charles III., or perhaps it would be safer to say, during the reign of that monarch, for he was more of a Nimrod than a statesman, and appears to have occupied himself with grand batidas for stags, wild boars, and other game, rather than with the welfare of his people, and this at the very time when the magnificent colonial empire of Spain was gradually slipping from his grasp. Whoever it may have been that inspired the new gypsy law of 1783, its author at least recognized the failure of the penal decrees of the three preceding centuries, and instituted in their place a more humane method of dealing with the nomads.

Under the new law the gypsies were, in the first place, declared "not to be so by nature or origin, nor to proceed from an infected root." It was enacted that to such of them as should abandon their distinctive mode of life, dress, and language, the whole share of offices, employments, trades and occupations, should be open equally with other Spanish subjects. The whole range of trade, art, science, and the professions, were thrown open to such of the gitanos as should abjure their former vagabond life with all its evil associations; and penalties were imposed on any who should attempt to molest them or to oppose their entry within the pale of civilized life.

Finally, the law was declared to be equal as between a reclaimed gypsy and any other "vassal" of Spain: but a death-penalty was prescribed against such of the nomad race as declined this invitation to embrace an honest life, and who continued their former habits.

The effect of this measure is marked, though the gitano survives. Fifty years of equal rights accomplished in this case what centuries of oppression had failed to achieve. Gitanismo is certainly not extinguished, but it was modified and brought more or less under control. The numbers of the gitanos have ever since decreased: they are slowly relinquishing their vagrant habits, and live more in cities and towns, and less in the mountains and fields. Ages, probably, would be required wholly to eradicate the inveterate criminality practised from birth by the Rommany race since unknown times—if, indeed, its entire eradication is possible. But certainly the humane measure of Charles III. during the lifetime of a man produced more tangible results than the persecution of preceding centuries.

The gitano caste in Spain were at one time estimated at 60,000. Fifty years ago, after half a century of equal laws, their numbers had fallen to 40,000, of which one-third were inhabitants of Andalucia; while at the present day, even that total might probably be reduced by one-half.