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The Roma in Romanian History

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Viorel Achim

Chapter I. The arrival of the gypsies on the territory of romania

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1. THE GYPSIES’ MIGRATION TO EUROPE

  • 1 A list of these hypotheses can be found in J-P. Clébert, Les Tziganes, Paris, 1961, pp. 15–40; F. (...)
  • 2 H. M. G. Grellmann, Die Zigeuner. Ein historischer Versuch über die Lebensart und Verfassung, Sitt (...)
  • 3 The results of research carried out until the present synthesised by H. Arnold, Die Zigeuner. Herk (...)

1Virtually everything that is known about the more distant history of the Gypsies is due to linguistics. After centuries in which the most varied and lurid explanations1 were advanced for the origins and history of this people, with racial and cultural characteristics different to those of the peoples of Europe, in the second half of the eighteenth century comparative philology discovered the similarity between the spoken language of the Gypsies and Sanskrit. On the basis of this discovery, German scholar H. M. G. Grellmann concluded in the first modern scientific work dedicated to the Gypsies, which appeared in 1783, that the Gypsy population was of Indian origin.2 In later studies it was rigorously demonstrated that the spoken language of the Gypsies and Sanskrit were related. The Romany language, also known as Romani or Romanes, belongs to the Indo-European language family. It is a member of the Neo-Indian group of languages, making it a relative of certain languages spoken in the Indian subcontinent. However, in conditions in which Romanes possesses elements that are common to many Indian (and non-Indian) languages and in spite of numerous attempts on the part of linguists over the course of more than a century, it has not been possible to identify the region or population where the origins of the speakers of Romanes lie. The general consensus has been for either North-west or Central India. Neither physical anthropology nor ethnology has been able to provide a decisive response to this question and to locate the ethnic group or caste to which the ancestors of the Gypsies belonged. In the current century, the nomadic way of life can still be found in the Indian cultural space, in not negligible proportions. However, the nomadic tribes of India have not yet been researched sufficiently, while population movements have been frequent in this part of the world. Consequently, it has not been possible to locate precisely the area from which the Gypsies set off in their migration towards Europe. The reasons for their departure from their primordial home­land are not known, nor the period of the first migrations. Much remains unknown with regard to the early history of the Gypsies.3

  • 4 F. Miklosich, Über die Mundarten unde die Wanderungen der Zigeuner Europa’s, vol. iii, Wien, 1873 (...)

2There remain many unknowns with regard to the migration of the Gypsies out of India and as far as Europe. The migration took place over an extended period of time and was not dramatic in nature. Consequently, it has left little documentary trace behind it. With the use of linguistics it has been possible to reconstruct in broad lines the itineraries followed by the Gypsies in the course of their migrations. The Romany dialects spoken in different European countries include numerous words and grammatical structures that have not been brought with the Gypsies from India, but which have been borrowed from the different peoples with whom the Gypsies have come into contact in the course of their migration. These linguistic borrowings are an indicator of the places through which the different groups of the Gypsies have passed. Studying the Romany dialects through the prism of these borrowings, more than a century ago the renowned linguist Franz Miklosich established the route followed by the Gypsies from India to Europe. He demonstrated that the Persian and Armenian elements present in all the dialects of Romanes indicate that they passed through Persia and old Armenia before arriving in Asia Minor. The abundance of words from medieval Greek in the language spoken by the Gypsies of Europe shows that they spent an extended period of time on Greek-speaking territories, i.e. the Byzantine Empire. The substantial amount of basic vocabulary from Slavonic is proof of the fact that the Gypsies spent some time in the Balkan Peninsula. Miklosich also affirms that the Romany dialects of Central and Northern Europe contain a smaller, though revealing, proportion of Romanian words, the presence of which he interprets as proof of the passing of the Gypsies through Romania. Finally, elements from German can be found in the Romany dialects spoken in England, Poland, Russia, Finland and Scandinavia, an indicator of the fact that those Gypsies spent a period of time within the German language space.4

3Migration routes were thus reconstructed initially using the linguistic method, for its conclusions to be for the most part confirmed later on by historical research. However, the chronology of this process and the contemporary political context in which it took place remain problems that have only partially been explained. The literature on the subject, not negligible in terms of quantity, is quite lacking in the rigour that generally characterises European medieval studies. The history of the Gypsies prior to the fourteenth century remains, to a large extent, the domain of hypothesis.

  • 5 From literature regarding the migration of the Gypsies in Europe: C. Hopf, Die Einwanderung der Zi (...)

4It is generally accepted that the migration of the Gypsies from India to Europe took place between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries, in a number of waves.5 It is believed that the Gypsies arrived in Persia during the ninth century. Persian sources call them Luli or Luri; in the middle of the tenth century they are attested to under the Arab name Zott. These names were, however, used indiscriminately for anybody coming from India. The Gypsies would have been able to reach Persia as part of population movements from the East or a Persian military expedition to India. They stayed there for a long period of time, as demonstrated by the large number of Per­sian words present in the European Romany dialects. The Gypsies also must have spent a fairly long period of time in old Armenia, since the Romany dialects of Europe contain Armenian terms. From here they entered Asia Minor, thereby entering Greek language territory.

  • 6 See F. Miklosich, “Über den Ursprung des Wortes ‘Zigeuner’”, in Über die Mundarten, VI (Vienna, 18 (...)
  • 7 Ilse Rochow, K-P. Matschke, “Neues zu den Zigeunern im byzantinischen Reich um die Wende vom 13. z (...)
  • 8 G. Soulis, op. cit., pp. 145–147.

5The appearance of the Gypsies in the Byzantine Empire has been linked to the raids of the Seljuk Turks in Armenia in the middle of the eleventh century. It is certain that their arrival in the Byzantine Empire was a gradual process. It was here that they acquired the ethnic name they bear today: Tsigane.6 In Greek, they were called Athínganos or Atsínganos, after the name of a heretical sect. In Byzantine sources, there are more references to Athinganos, which some authors linked with the newcomers to the Empire. It is generally believed that the first attestation of the Gypsies in the Byzantine Empire is contained in a Georgian hagiographic text dating from the year 1068: in the text, there are references to so-called Adsincani, renowned for their sorcery and evil deeds. A recent study, however, claims that the earliest definite attestation to the Gypsies can be found in a letter of the Patriarch of Constantinople, Gregorios II Kyprios (1283–89), where there is mention of taxes to be collected from so-called Egyptians and Athinganos (’o toùs kaì Aìgyptíous kaì Athingánous).7 This means that if not all, then most of the previous attestations of the Athinganous, which have lead to the attempt to date the presence of the Gypsies in Byzantium back to the eleventh century,8 in fact refer to members of the Manichean sect, whose name was also attributed to the Gypsies.

6From Asia Minor they passed into Thrace. This probably took place at the start of the fourteenth century, when it is believed that the European history of the Gypsies began. From Thrace they were dispersed in all directions. One group headed south, into what is today Greece. In 1323, a Franciscan friar met them at Candia (Iraklion) on the island of Crete and produced a description of them. In the second half of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth century in the Peloponnese, the western part of continental Greece and the Ionian Islands, the Gypsies are shown to already be a sedentary people, meaning that they must have been in that area for a considerable period of time; the migration probably took place at the beginning of the fourteenth century. They settled especially in the Peloponnese and on neighbouring islands, territories under the control of Venice. The Gypsies stayed for a long time on Greek-speaking territory (in Asia Minor, the Balkan Peninsula and the islands), the proof being the considerable influence of Greek on Romanes.

  • 9 B. P. Hasdeu, “Rosturile unei cǎrt,i de donat,iune de pe la anul 1348, emanatǎde la împǎratul sârb (...)
  • 10 Dj. Petrovic´, “Cigani u srednjiovekovnom Dubrovniku”, Zbornik Filozofskog fakulteta, XIII/1, Belg (...)
  • 11 Gr. A. Ilinski, Gramoty bolgarskich carei, Moscow, 1911, pp. 26–28.

7During the same period, the Gypsies arrived in the Slavonic countries of the Balkan Peninsula. The earliest mention of them comes from the year 1348, in the Serbia of Tsar Stefan Dušan; a number of cingarije are named among artisans working under the authority of the Prizren monastery.9 Starting in 1362, they begin to be mentioned at Ragusa (Dubrovnik).10 In 1378, they are mentioned in Bulgaria: a document issued in that year by Ivan Šišman, the last tsar of Bulgaria, detailing the possessions of the Rila monastery includes a reference to agupovy kléti (“the huts of the Egyptians”), very likely a reference to the Gypsies.11

  • 12 See the following sub-chapter.

8From the Balkans, some of the Gypsies crossed to the north bank of the Danube into Romanian territory. They are mentioned for the first time in an official document in Wallachia in 1385, in Transylvania around the year 1400 and in Moldavia in 1428.12 Others headed west into the Kingdom of Hungary and from there travelled further into Central and Western Europe.

  • 13 E. de Hurmuzaki, Documente privitoare la istoria românilor, vol. I/2, ed. N. Densus,ianu, Buchares (...)
  • 14 J. Vekerdi, “Earliest Archival Evidence on Gypsies in Hungary”, Journal of the Gypsy Lord Society, (...)

9It is not known exactly when the Gypsies arrived in the Hungarian King-dom. The first attestation in an official document appears in 1422, when King Sigismund of Luxembourg grants free movement through his kingdom to a group of Gypsies, lead by the voivode Vladislav.13 However, it is certain their presence in the kingdom dates from sometime earlier. Evidence from place and personal names has been evoked to support the theory that the Gypsies arrived in Hungary at an earlier time.14

10At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Gypsies had already arrived in the countries of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1407, the documents of the town of Hindelsheim in Lower Saxony mention the presence there of “Tatars”, the name by which the Gypsies would be known in Northern Germany. In 1414, they are cited in the Swiss town of Basel as Heiden (“pagans”), a term that will be used for them for a long time in a number of Germanspeaking countries, as well as in Holland. The chronicles place them in Hesse in 1414 and in Meissen and Bohemia in 1416. These were probably small groups.

  • 15 See F. de Vaux de Foletier, op. cit., pp. 44ff.

11Central and Western Europe discover the Gypsies in the years 1416–19. At that time, there was a more sizeable influx of the Gypsies in the countries of Europe, from Hungary to Germany and France.15 Local records and chronicles attest to the arrival in different places of groups made up of people of foreign appearance, language, customs etc., stating that they come from Egypt and that they are pilgrims who have got lost on their way to Jerusalem. They are named “Egyptians” or “Saracens”. They were small groups made up of thirty to forty people, whose leaders were known as “dukes” or “counts”. Some groups presented to the authorities the safe passage they had been granted from Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg. Contemporary sources describe them as a curiosity and generally speak of them in positive terms, while the local people gave them food and money. For a number of years the Gypsies wandered throughout Europe in genuine expeditions. Sometimes the same group is attested to successively in the different places.

12In 1419, the first groups of the Gypsies are signalled on the territory of modern-day France, while in 1420 they reach the Low Countries. In 1422, a large group enters Italy, reaching Rome. In the following decades, the Gypsies reached Spain, England and Scandinavia. In Spain, they arrived via two paths: through the Pyrenees from France (at the beginning of the fifteenth century) and over the Mediterranean (starting from 1488). The number of Gypsies in Spain was large from the beginning. They arrived in the British Isles at the start of the sixteenth century; the first mention of their presence there dates from 1514. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Gypsies entered Scandinavia, via England. They entered the Kingdom of Poland via two paths: from Hungary and from the Romanian territories. Their pres­ence there is mentioned starting from 1428. From Poland they entered the Baltic lands, while in Southern Russia they first appeared around 1501.

13If the Gypsies were initially known as “Egyptians” and “Saracens”, they very quickly acquired the name they still bear today in the languages of Europe. In Germany the most frequently used names are Zigeuner—noted for the first time in the journal of Andreas, a priest from Regensburg (Bavaria), in the year 1424—and Sinte (plural: Sinti); the latter term is used only for part of the population of Indian origin and is presumed to originate from a hypothetical king of theirs. In French the name Bohémien was adopted. This can be explained by the fact that the new arrivals presented letters of protection from Sigismund of Luxembourg, the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Bohemia, and it was therefore considered that they came from that country. In English and Spanish, they were given the names Gypsy and Gitano respectively, the names originating from their presumed Egyptian origin. In Denmark, Sweden and Finland, they were named Tattare (“Tatars”).

  • 16 A. Fraser, op. cit., pp. 81–82.

14The migration of the Gypsies into Central and Western Europe was probably linked to the Turkish advance in the south-east of the continent. The appearance of the Turks in the Balkans forced the Gypsies further on. The European migration of the Gypsies in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was a lasting phenomenon. It was not, however, a mass exodus. The majority of the Gypsy population stayed on in Turkey and the countries of south-eastern Europe, as well as Hungary.16 From the Middle Ages until today, these territories have remained the geographical area where the number of Gypsies, both in absolute figures as well as in proportion to the total population, has been and continues to be the largest.

15Thus was the migration of the Gypsies in Europe in broad lines. It represents, however, a particularly complex historical process that still contains many unknown factors. The linguistic method, particularly useful in this case, does have its limits. It has to be acknowledged that the migration of the Gypsies was not a targeted migration. The Gypsies living in India or Persia were not aiming to reach Europe. It was a spontaneous movement determined by an entire range of factors. Their arrival in Europe was conditioned by their contemporary surroundings. Military events played the principal role in determining the direction taken by the different groups of the Gypsies. Their migration took place in a time of major upheaval for the Middle East and South-Eastern Europe. Military events and population movements took place on those territories that could not have failed to have also an impact on the groups of the Gypsies. They fled first before the Seljuk Turks, then before the Ottoman Turks, heading inevitably towards the West.

16The Gypsies form part of a major demographic trend of long-lasting impact over the history of Europe: in the course of over one thousand years, numerous peoples originating in Asia settled in Europe. The Gypsies were the last people of Asian origin to arrive in our continent. Their arrival in fact marks the end of the migrations of peoples. The distinguishing feature of the Gypsy migration is that it was not of a military nature.

  • 17 The meaning of the word Rom is that of “Roman”, Romaíos, a name that was in general applied to the (...)

17However, the migration of the Gypsies from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries took many different directions and routes. For example, both recent and earlier research have demonstrated that in old Armenia the Gypsies scattered in three directions: one route took them through the countries of the Middle East as far as Egypt, another took them into the countries of the Caucasus and to the north of the Black Sea, while the third route, the most important of the three, took them into the Byzantine Empire and from there into Europe. Writers in the previous century, writing when the study of the history of the Gypsies did not yet have the rigorous foundations of later times, believed that the Gypsies had been brought to Europe by the Mongols (Tatars); it was stated that the Gypsies had been picked up by the Mongols in Asia and brought to Europe either in 1241 together with the great invasion of the Mongols or later on. We shall see that although some Gypsies could have reached the territories in the east of the continent under the domination of the Mongols, there are no arguments to support the existence of a migration route around the north of the Black Sea for the Gypsies on their way into Europe. Today it is well established that the Gypsies that arrived in Europe had passed through Byzantium and the Balkans. They are the Indian population that is known in European languages as Tsiganes (and all its derivatives). Their own name for themselves recalls their stay in the Byzantine Empire: Rom.17

  • 18 “[…] generacio una parva sive populus, disperses per orbem […]. Vocantur Cyngani sive populus Phar (...)
  • 19 See further on pp. 120ff.

18During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Gypsies arrived almost everywhere in Europe. Already in 1404, Archbishop John of Sultanieh, a figure well acquainted with the realities of the situation in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, demonstrated in his geographical treatise Libellus de notitia Orbis that the Gypsies had spread everywhere.18 From the fifteenth century onwards, they are a part of the ethnic landscape of the countries of Europe. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, together with the expulsions and deportations to which they were subjected or the process of colonisation outside the borders of Europe which began in Portugal, Spain, France and England, the Gypsies reached North and South America, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and other places. From European Russia, they reached Siberia. To the migration of the Middle Ages can be later added, in the second half of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, another smaller wave of migration from the east of the continent, particularly from Romania, which contributed to the spread of the Gypsies throughout Europe.19 Today virtually every country in Europe has a Gypsy population. There are, however, also Gypsies living in the countries of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, present since the time of their first migrations. Of course, due to their different migra­tion routes, or more precisely the fact that they did not pass through the Byzantine Empire, these Gypsies do not know the ethnic name Tsigane or Rom: they are known by and call themselves different names. They do belong, however, to the same population as the Gypsies of Europe.

2. FIRST ATTESTATIONS ON THE TERRITORY OF ROMANIA

  • 20 Documenta Romaniae Historica, B, T,ara Româneascǎ, vol. I, Bucharest, 1966, pp. 19–22. (Hereafter (...)
  • 21 E. Lǎzǎrescu, “Nicodim de la Tismana şi rolul sǎu în cultura veche româneascǎ”, Romano-slavica XI (...)
  • 22 DRH, B, I, pp. 17–19; the document is dated, we believe, incorrectly as “‹1374›”.

19The earliest written information about the presence of the Gypsies on the territory of Romania dates from 1385. In a deed issued in that year, Dan I, the prince of Wallachia, amongst other things awards to the Tismana monastery the possessions previously belonging to the Vodiţa monastery, which had been given to the latter by the Prince Wladislav I: among the possessions in question are forty families of Gypsies (aţigani).20 The possessions in question had belonged to the Vodiţa monastery on the banks of the Danube, located in the western extremity of the country. The monastery had been founded by Wladislav I in the years 1370–71 and had ceased to function a short time after, probably in 1376, during the political and military events taking place in the area and the conflict between Wallachia and the Hungarian Kingdom for the land of Severin.21 It must have been in the years 1370–71 that the initial donation had been made to the Vodiţa monastery. The text of the donation, which has been preserved,22 mentions the possessions listed in the deed of Dan I from 1385, minus the forty Gypsy families. This means that the Gypsies were donated to the monastery later on, in a deed of donation which has not been preserved, or that they were omitted from the initial deed of donation. This author is inclined to believe that the Gypsies came to be under the dominion of the Vodiţa monastery via a new deed of donation. Since Wladislav I most probably died in 1377, the donation must have taken place between 1371 and 1377. It is during these years that the passing of the Gypsy families into the possession of the Vodiţa monastery can be placed. The first document attesting to the presence of the Gypsies in Wallachia is connected to this event.

  • 23 Ibid., pp. 22–25, 33–36, 39–42, 154–156.
  • 24 Ibid., pp. 25–28. Confirmations in ‹1392›, ‹1421› (where only 45 families of Gypsies are mentioned (...)

20Later on, information about the Gypsies in Wallachia becomes increasingly numerous. The Gypsies of the Tismana monastery are mentioned in all subsequent confirmations of the possessions of the monastery, in 1387, 1391–1392, circa 1392, 1439.23 In 1388, the Wallachian prince Mircea the Old donated to the Cozia monastery, the monastery that he founded, 300 dwellings of Gypsies.24 In general, in the fifteenth century, all the most important monasteries and boyars owned Gypsies as slaves. Official documents of the time that refer to donations or official acknowledgements of domin­ion record their presence on the most important feudal estates.

  • 25 Documenta Romaniae Historica A, Moldova, vol., I, Bucharest, 1975, pp. 109–110. (Hereafter DRH, A.
  • 26 Ibid., pp. 124–126.
  • 27 Ibid., p. 184.
  • 28 Ibid., p. 185.

21In Moldavia, the Gypsies are mentioned for the first time in 1428 when prince Alexander the Good awards to the Bistriţa monastery thirty-one families of Gypsies (ţigani) and twelve huts of Tatars.25 Later on, Gypsies are attested as belonging to, in chronological order, the monasteries of Vişnevǎţi (1429),26 Poianǎ (1434),27 Moldoviţa (1434),28 as well as to other monasteries and some important boyars.

  • 29 DRH, B, I, pp. 32–33.
  • 30 J. Vekerdi, op. cit.

22In Transylvania, the first mention of the presence of the Gypsies refers to the land of Fǎgǎras,. In the time of Mircea the Old, the prince of Wallachia, a boyar known as Costea, held dominion in the land of Fǎgǎras, over the villages of Viştea de Jos, Viştea de Sus and half of Arpaşu de Jos, as well as seventeen tent-dwelling Gypsies (Ciganus tentoriatos).29 The original deed by Mircea the Old written in Slavonic has not been preserved, but is summarised in a text in Latin from 1511; however, from the title used by the prince, the deed can be dated between 1390 and 1406. Under the terms of the relations of suzerainty-vassalage that existed at the time between the king of Hungary and the prince of Wallachia, Mircea the Old held dominion over the land of Fǎgǎras, with the title of fief. Therefore, Gypsies were already present in Transylvania around the year 1400. It can be presupposed that the Gypsies were present in Transylvania even earlier, since from the 1370s there are attestations to toponyms deriving from the Hungarian word cigány in North-western Transylvania; this from a time when similar toponyms and personal names deriving from the same word appear in many different regions of the Hungarian Kingdom.30

23Whether in the case of the earliest attestations mentioned above the Gypsies had arrived recently or had been present from an earlier time, this is a question that can only be answered via an analysis that takes into account both the nature of the problem of the European migration of the Gypsies and the socio–political realities of the Romanian space in the fourteenth century.

3. WHEN DID THE GYPSIES ARRIVE IN THE ROMANIAN LANDS?

  • 31 It has been stated that the Gypsies were present in the Romanian Plain even during the time of the (...)
  • 32 N. Iorga, Anciens documents de droit roumain, Paris–Bucharest, 1930, pp. 22–23.
  • 33 T. G. Bulat, “T,iganii domnes,ti, din Moldova, la 1810”, Arhivele Basarabiei, IV (1933), no. 2, p. (...)
  • 34 Ibid.

24In Romanian historiography the appearance of the Gypsies in Romanian territory was linked to the Mongols (Tatars).31 Nicolae Iorga believed that the Gypsies arrived in the Romanian principalities together with the Mongol invasion of 1241.32 Other historians shared this view.33 The Gypsies in the Romanian lands were seen as a legacy of the Tatars. The Tatars supposedly brought them to this part of Europe, whilst the Gypsies remained after the withdrawal of the Tatars as the slaves of the Romanians. The theory is based on the fact that the institution of slavery is attested to in Romanian lands from the first official documents, so it is presumed that the practice existed before the founding of the principalities. Gypsy slaves, therefore, would have existed from the Mongol period, i.e. from the thirteenth century. Another opinion states that the Tatar slaves referred to even earlier than Gypsy slaves in Moldavian documents were in fact Gypsies from an ethnic point of view.34 They were Gypsies brought by the Tatars as slaves, whose ownership was taken over by the Romanians. The Tatar slaves from the Moldavian documents were seen as the first wave of the Gypsy population to arrive in Romanian lands; the second wave would have been that which arrived from the south of the Danube beginning in the fourteenth century.

25It is well known that during the invasion of 1241–42 and then during the period of more than a century in which they were a major power in Eastern Europe, the Tatars brought to the West numerous oriental populations as auxiliary troops or slaves. Certain of these populations, especially those of a military character, such as the Jazygians or Alans, are mentioned in contemporary documents. Others, however, are not mentioned, but later traces of these populations can be found in the countries in which the Tatars had ruled.

26Were the Gypsies one of these populations brought by the Tatars? In some older works on the Gypsies it is stated that they arrived in Europe under the aegis of the Mongols. Either with the Mongols of Ghenghis Khan in the first half of the thirteenth century or Timur Lenk (Tamberlaine) at the end of the fourteenth century could have taken the Gypsies in India and brought them to Europe. As a rule, it is presupposed that this took place during the great Mongol invasion of 1241–42. The view that the Mongols brought the Gypsies to Europe was, however, abandoned when the study of the migration of the Gypsies was subjected to more rigorous methods, beginning with the philological study of Franz Miklosich.

27Of course, the possibility that there were Gypsies among the populations brought west by the Tatars cannot be excluded. The camps of the Tatars were accompanied by craftsmen (especially blacksmiths and farriers) who had the status of slaves according to the model of organisation used in Mongol society. There may have been Gypsies among them. It is plausible that some of the Gypsies who travelled from Asia Minor into the Caucasus, thereby cutting themselves off from the bulk of their tribes, who headed into the Byzantine Empire and from there into Europe, came under the control of the Tatars. There is, however, no clear proof that would enable us to state that the Mongols brought the Gypsies with them in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

  • 35 DRH, A, I, p. 23.
  • 36 Ibid., pp. 44–45.
  • 37 Ibid., pp. 88–89.
  • 38 I. R. Mircea, “Termenii rob, şerbşi holop în documentele slave şi române”, Studiişi cercetǎri ştii (...)
  • 39 See I. Peretz, op. cit., pp. 46–58.
  • 40 N. Beldiceanu, Irène Beldiceanu-Steinherr, “Notes sur le Bir, les esclaves tatars et quelques char (...)

28As for the Tatar slaves in Moldavia, they are mentioned for the first time in a document from 1402 in which Alexander the Good donated to the Moldoviţa monastery (among others), four houses (families) of Tatars.35 In another document, from 1411, the same prince donated to the Poianǎ monastery five homesteads of Tatars,36 while in 1425 he confirmed to a boyar the possession of several villages and the Tatars living there.37 The first slaves referred to in Moldavian documents are, therefore, Tatars. Only in 1428, do the first Gypsy slaves make their appearance in the documents. Sometimes mention of both categories of slaves can be found in the same document. Tatar slaves are also attested to later on, as late as 1488. The “Tatars” from the Moldavian documents were not Gypsies. An analysis of the documents from the fifteenth century that mention both categories of slaves leads us to the conclusion that there were differences between the Tatar and Gypsy slaves that exclude the possibility that they belonged to the same ethnic group. It is possible to observe different types of names among the two categories of slaves: aside from names from the Christian calendar, the Tatars have Turkic names while the Gypsies have Romany names. Between the Tatar slaves and Gypsy slaves there are also differences in terms of habitat: the Tatars lived in fixed dwellings on the estate of the boyar, in villages and especially around the residence of the boyar, while some even lived in towns (as in the case of the Tatars of Baia, who were the property of the Moldoviţa monastery), while the Gypsies lived in tents.38 Official documents in Old Slavonic use different terms for the two populations: hiži tatary (Tatar huts) and dvory tatary (Tatar homesteads) and celiadi tsigany (Gypsy families). The legal status of the Tatars was also somewhat different to that of the Gypsies.39 The Tatar slaves in Moldavia were probably the remains of the Cuman population that had settled in the region prior to the Mongol invasion.40 It is clear that we are dealing with two populations that are different from an ethnic point of view, which shared the same social status, although even this contained certain differences.

29The history of the Gypsies in the Middle Ages in the other countries of Eastern Europe bordering with the Golden Horde rules out the possibility that it was the latter who brought the Gypsies to Europe. Neither the Poles, nor the Lithuanians, nor the Russians received Gypsies from their Tatar neighbours. The Gypsies in Russia originate from Romanian lands, not from areas ruled by the Tatars. The Gypsies arrived late to Russia, around the year 1500, while larger number settled there only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There is no record of Gypsies among the ranks of holops (slaves) in medieval Russia. In medieval Poland and Lithuania, states that took over part of the lands that the Tatars had ruled in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Gypsies originate from Hungary and the Romanian lands, not from the east. Similarly, the name “Tatar” used to refer to the Gypsies in Scandinavia has nothing to do with the Gypsies there being of Tatar origin.

  • 41 In Moldavia already in the first document to mention them (from 1428), while in Wallachian documen (...)
  • 42 L. Toppeltinus, Origines et occasus Transsilvanorum seu erutae nationes Transsylvaniae…, Lugdunum (...)
  • * Szekely—a Hungarian-speaking people akin to the Magyars, settled as frontier guards of the Kingdom (...)
  • 43 N. Grigoras,, op. cit., pp. 37–38.
  • 44 Cǎlǎtori strǎini despre ţǎrile române, vol. I, ed. Maria Holban, Bucharest, 1968, pp. 112–113.
  • 45 N. Grigoras,, op. cit., pp. 34–36.
  • 46 Cronicile slavo-române din sec. xvxvi, publicate de Ion Bogdan, ed. P. P. Panaitescu, Bucharest, (...)
  • 47 See G. Potra, op. cit., p. 28

30The fact that the Gypsies of Romania arrived there from south of the Danube is incontestable: there is a whole series of arguments to support this claim. The Romanians have always referred to them using a term of Greek origin: in the first documentary attestations they are referred to as aţigani, which later became, tigani, the term still in use today.41 Similarly, the spoken language of the Gypsies in Romania preserves a large number of Greek and South Slavonic words. In descriptions of the Gypsies made in Transylvania, they are presented as adhering to the Orthodox religion,42 even in conditions in which they lived not only among the majority Orthodox Romanians there, but also among the Catholic or Protestant Hungarians, Szeklers (Székely*) and Saxons. Contemporary sources demonstrated that it was from the area south of the Danube that a large number of Gypsies came or were brought to Romanian lands.43 In 1445, Vlad Dracul, the prince of Wallachia, transferred 12,000 people to the north of the Danube. Chronicler Jehan of Wavrin, who recorded this piece of information for posterity, indicates that they resembled Gypsies.44 The migration of the Gypsies from the Balkans into the Romanian territory was a demographic process of long duration. Even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were groups of Gypsies, some Turkish-speaking and Muslims, who passed from the Ottoman Empire into the Romanian lands. In Moldavia, the vast majority of Gypsies were brought from Wallachia. There is documentary evidence for a permanent movement of Gypsies from Wallachia to Moldavia.45 The Mol-davian-German chronicle, recounting Stephen the Great’s expedition to Wallachia in 1471, indicates that he “took 17,000 Gypsies captive”.46 There are also official sources that attest to the capture of slaves by Stephen the Great on the territory of his neighbour.47

  • 48 G. Soulis, op. cit., pp. 151–152.
  • 49 See above note 9.

31The Gypsies are nomads of Indian origin that arrived in the Romanian territories via the Balkans, after having spent a relatively long period of time in the Byzantine Empire, where they acquired the name Tsigane. Despite the incompleteness of the information about the Gypsies, it has been demonstrated that their appearance in the Balkan Peninsula occurred no earlier than the beginning of the fourteenth century.48 In 1348, they are mentioned in a deed of Tsar Stefan Dušan of Serbia.49 In Wallachia at some point between 1371 and 1377, the prince made a gift of Gypsy slaves, as it arises from the aforementioned document from 1385. From Wallachia, the Gypsies entered Transylvania, where they are attested for the first time in the deed issued by Mircea the Old around the year 1400, referring to the land of Fǎgǎras, then in the possession of the Wallachian prince, and Moldavia, where the Gypsies are mentioned from 1428 onwards.

32But when does the presence of these Gypsies in the Romanian lands date from? When did the first groups of Gypsies cross to the North of the Danube? A precise answer cannot be clearly given. In Wallachia, from where the earliest attestation of the Gypsies originate, there are no official documents that have been located relating to the possessions of the Crown prior to the donation to the Vodiţa monastery. Therefore, it is not possible to say whether there were Gypsy slaves in Wallachia prior to this moment. It can only be supposed that in 1370–71 Wladislav I was not master of the Gypsies that he would later give to the Vodiţa monastery. It was only at a later stage that they entered into the possession of the prince.

  • 50 For events in the region during this period, see particularly Maria Holban, “Contribuţii la studiu (...)
  • 51 Mauro Orbini, Il regno degli Slavi, hoggi corrotamente deti Schiavoni…, Pessaro, 1601, p. 470; cf. (...)
  • 52 N. Grigoras, op. cit., pp. 36–38.

33The second half of the 1360s and at the beginning of the 1370s was a time of great turmoil in the north of the Balkan Peninsula. Political and military events succeeded one another at a rapid pace. The Hungarian–Bulgarian and Hungarian–Wallachian conflicts, the struggle for Severin and the military expeditions that preceded it and the transformation of north-west Bulgaria into a theatre of war, to which can be added the incursions of the Ottomans recently commenced in Europe,50 all created population movements in the region. One source, admittedly from a later time, that presents the events that took place then in Bulgaria, in which Wallachia was also involved, indicates that after Prince Wladislav I had driven the Hungarian army out of Vidin in January 1369, he carried out substantial population transfers from the right to the left bank of the Danube.51 It could have been in the course of such population movements that the Gypsies given to the Vodiţa monastery arrived in Wallachia. The fact that at Vodiţa (and later at Tismana) monastery they are slaves is not an indicator that they had been living for a long time in Wallachia. Gypsy slaves also existed in the Balkan states, and if the Gypsies passed into Wallachia or Moldavia as freemen, as a rule they would have immediately been enslaved, entering automatically into the possession of the prince.52

34We believe that the first Gypsies are agreed to have arrived in Wallachia at this time, during the rule of Wladislav I, most likely at the beginning of the 1370s, either crossing or being transferred from the south of the Danube. It is impossible to know whether they were the Gypsies of Vodiţa, but they were certainly contemporaries of that group. Therefore, the Gypsies arrived on Romanian territory around the year 1370, some decades after their arrival in the Balkan Peninsula.

35The Gypsies did not arrive in the Romanian lands in a single wave, but rather over several centuries. Starting from the fifteenth century, there is evidence of Gypsies crossing to the north of the Danube.

  • 53 D. Cantemir, Descrierea Moldovei, trad. Gh. Guţu, Bucharest, 1973, p. 297.

36The number of Gypsies in both principalities was already quite large in the fifteenth century. As arising from the documents relating to the possessions of the monasteries and the leading boyars, the social category of slaves was well represented there. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Dimitrie Cantemir stated that in Moldavia the Gypsies were “spread throughout the country” and that “there was almost no boyar that did not have several Gypsy families in his possession.”53 In the absence of statistical sources that include slaves (a situation that continued until around 1800), it is impossible to estimate the number of Gypsies living in Wallachia and Moldavia.

  • 54 Urkundenbuch zur Geschichte der Deutschen in Siebenbürgen, vol. vii, Bucharest, 1991, p. 113; A. G (...)
  • 55 Hurmuzaki, XV/1, p. 152.
  • 56 Maja Philippi, “Die Bevölkerung Kronstadts im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert. Siedlungsverhältnisse und e (...)
  • 57 S. Márki, Arad vármegye története, vol. II, Arad, 1892, pp. 503–504.
  • 58 Nicolae Stoica de Haţeg, Cronica Banatului, ed. D. Mioc, Bucharest, 1969, p. 48.
  • 59 1442: “Czigan Karacion jobagio”; 1450: “Czigan Nan” (I. Mihály, Diplome maramures,ene din secolul (...)

37With regard to Transylvania, it should be acknowledged that the Gypsies appeared here, as in the rest of the Hungarian Kingdom to which the province belonged, during the final decades of the fourteenth century. The Gypsies entered Transylvania via Wallachia. Some of them later passed into Hungary proper. However, the Gypsies who entered Hungary also arrived there directly from the Balkan Peninsula without passing first through Wallachia and Transylvania. It would appear that most of them followed the route through the Balkans, the proof being the fact that the language of the Gypsies in Hungary in this period did not contain Romanian elements. Even if documentary information about the Gypsies in Transylvania at this early stage is scarcer in comparison with Wallachia and Moldavia, towards the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the following century we find them present in almost the entire country. In Sibiu, they are attested to in royal privileges in 1476, 1487 and 1492.54 In 1500, Gypsies are attested to at Bran castle.55 In Braşov, where two persons with the name “Cziganen” appear in the tax records for the years 1475–1500, the first clear attestation of the Gypsies dates from 1524, when the tax records register the presence on the edge of the town of the toponym “By den czyganen” (later known as “Ziganie”).56 In 1493, we find a band of Gypsies at Cladova in the county of Arad, led by their voivode, Rajkó.57 Around the year 1500, Gypsies are casting cannons in the citadel of Timişoara,58 while in 1514, we find Gypsy executioners carrying out the torture of György Dózsa. In Maramures, in the middle of the fifteenth century we come across the nickname “, Tigan” applied to certain Romanian serfs and nobles.59

  • 60 Caǎlǎtori strǎini despre ţǎrile române, vol. ii, ed. Maria Holban, M. M Alexan-drescu-Dersca Bulga (...)
  • 61 L. Toppeltinus, op. cit., p. 55.
  • 62 Cluj’s town council took just such a measure in 1585, when it decided to demolish the huts constru (...)
  • 63 B. Mezey et al., op. cit., p. 10.

38The Gypsies formed part of the varied ethnic landscape of Transylvania. In 1564, referring to the Szekler land, the Italian Giovanandrea Gromo indicates that “among [the Szeklers] live a large number of Gypsies, whom they use to work the land”.60 A century later, Laurentius Toppeltinus indicates that there are a large number of Gypsies living in Transylvania.61 The larger Transylvanian towns each had its own “Gypsy settlement”, usually located outside the town walls. These settlements were built of wood, so that if necessary the town authorities could easily destroy them and drive the Gypsies out.62 Gypsies are also found in some villages, settled on a noble’s estate and transformed into serfs. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a large part of the Gypsies living in Transylvania were already leading a sedentary life.63 However, some continued to lead a nomadic existence even until the twentieth century.

  • 64 N. Grigoras,, op. cit., pp. 37, 75.
  • 65 Hurmuzaki, II/2, p. 530.
  • 66 N. Grigoras,, op. cit., p. 37.

39The number of Gypsies living in Transylvania for the period prior to the seventeenth century cannot be estimated. In comparison with Hungary, the number was certainly larger as a proportion of the population. This was probably not the case in comparison to Wallachia and Moldavia. The principalities lying beyond the Carpathians played a role in supplying Transylvania with Gypsies. Slavery in Wallachia and Moldavia induced the Gypsies to pass into Transylvania, where they benefited from a better social status. For centuries there has been a certain movement of Gypsies from Wallachia and Moldavia into Transylvania. There are numerous documents attesting to the crossing of isolated groups of Gypsies into Transylvania, their subsequent revendication by their former masters and often their return to those masters.64 A document from 1504 shows explicitly that a group of Gypsies settled in the district of Haţeg came from Wallachia.65 It is true that there were cases in which Moldavians bought Gypsies from Transylvania,66 but the migratory process for the Gypsies was moving the opposite direction.

4. THE TERRITORY OF ROMANIA IN THE CONTEXT OF THE EUROPEAN MIGRATION OF THE GYPSIES (FOURTEENTH TO FIFTEENTH CENTURIES)

  • 67 C. Hopf, op. cit., especially pp. 23, 25–26.

40Specialist literature on the history of the Gypsies contains some opinions that confer an important role upon Romanian territory in the context of the European migration of the Gypsies during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. According to Carl Hopf, who dealt specifically with the problem of the migration of the Gypsies in a work that appeared in 1870, the Romanian lands were a site of concentration for the Gypsies that had arrived from the East. From here, they migrated south into the Balkan Peninsula at the earliest available opportunity due to the conditions of slavery imposed on them. According to the analysis of Hopf, the military campaigns conducted by the Serbian Tsar Stefan Dušan brought about the dispersal of the Gypsies throughout the Balkan Peninsula as far as Greece.67

  • 68 See G. Soulis, op. cit., p. 162.

41There is no documentary evidence to support Hopf’s theory. On the contrary, the historical facts contradict it. The first mentions of the Gypsies in Romania occur after the earliest evidence of their presence in Greece. We come across Gypsies on the Greek islands prior to Stefan Dušan’s Balkan campaigns.68 The direction taken by the Gypsies was not from the Roman­ian territories to the area south of the Danube, but from the Balkan Peninsula to the area north of the Danube. Beginning with the fifteenth century, there is sufficient written evidence of the Gypsies being brought from the Balkans and of crossing to the north of the Danube by individuals or even by large groups. For Wallachia, the lands to the south of the Danube, served as a veritable reservoir of Gypsies, especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but also later on.

42This theory is linked to the opinion popular in the nineteenth century that the Gypsies arrived in Europe under the aegis of the Mongols. It is generally considered that this population came to Europe via the steppes north of the Black Sea, either brought by the Tatars or contemporary to the Tatars. The oriental origins of the Gypsies, their cultural characteristics and their nomadic lifestyle as well as the fact that in many countries they were called “Tatars” all contributed to the creation of this opinion. According to this theory, the route followed by the Gypsies necessarily passed through the Romanian lands. The Romanian lands were therefore the first stage in the European migration of the Gypsies. However, the opinion that attributed to the Tatars the role of having brought the Gypsies into Europe began to be abandoned in the second half of the nineteenth century when, together with the linguistic study carried out by Miklosich, research into the European migration of the Gypsies acquired a more rigorous foundation. Today, it is clear that the Gypsies came to Europe via the Byzantine Empire and the Balkan Peninsula. Their arrival in the European continent took place only at the start of the fourteenth century. Over time, both philological and historical arguments have been adduced to support this version of events.

43What role did the Romanian territory play in the migration across Byzantium and the Balkan Peninsula that brought the Gypsies to Central and Western Europe? The answer should not only take into account the geographical position of the Romanian territories and the possibility that the Gypsies stopped for a time north of the Danube before heading into Central and Western Europe. It is incontestable that the Romanian territories have always had a large number of Gypsies. If this is clear for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when it is possible, admittedly with a broad margin of error, to estimate the number of Gypsies, the situation was probably not much different in previous centuries, for which there are no statistics. Already in the fifteenth century certain monasteries owned hundreds of Gypsy slaves, especially in Wallachia. It is clear that a large part of the Gypsies who left the Balkan Peninsula in the fourteenth and fifteenth century headed for the Romanian lands. The Romanian lands appear as one of the principal destinations of these migrations. It can be stated that in the Balkans these nomads of Indian origin that came via Asia Minor set off on three routes: to the south towards continental Greece and the Ionian islands; to the west, reaching Hun­gary and then later the countries of Central and Western Europe; and to the north, crossing the Danube into the Romanian principalities. It is certain that the pressure created by the Ottomans in the Balkans in the second half of the fourteenth century and the first half of the following century had a role in influencing the movement of countless groups of Gypsies north of the Danube. The Romanian principalities, which, unlike the Balkan states, were not occupied by the Ottomans and which preserved their internal forms of organisation were at that time a place of refuge for the population of the Balkans, a situation that is reflected in contemporary documents. The territories to the north of the Danube played an important role in the migration of the Gypsies.

44In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Romanian principalities were not located on the route that led the Gypsies into Central and Western Europe. The possibility of a stay of either longer or shorter duration to the north of the Danube, followed by a movement towards the west of the continent, can be ruled out. There is no contemporary document, either Romanian or foreign, that refers to a population movement of this kind.

  • 69 Fr. Miklosich, Über die Mundarten, III, pp. 13–16.
  • 70 See below, pp. 120ff.

45In his study in which he attempts to reconstruct the route followed by the Gypsies using linguistic data, Miklosich states that the Gypsies who reached Central and Western Europe passed through the Romanian territories. He bases his argument on the presence of Romanian words in the dialects spoken by the Gypsies.69 This affirmation requires further examination. The method of research applied by Miklosich provides an interpretation of linguistic data accumulated over hundreds of years, but without making the necessary chronological distinctions. When he speaks about Romanian elements, he is referring to the Romany dialects spoken during his time. Yet the modern dialects are the result of the merging of vernaculars spoken by different groups of Gypsies. Miklosich does not grasp the fact that the respective dialects (like the populations that spoke them) were the result of the overlapping of two large migratory waves, the first in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and a second contemporaneous to Miklosich (about which he is in fact aware) which was taking place in the second half of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. The second wave set off from Romania will be dealt with in one of the sub-chapters of this book,70 accounts for the Romanian elements in the dialects spoken in the second half of the nineteenth century, which are still spoken today by the majority of European Gypsies. These elements are not present as a result of the migration that took place in the Middle Ages. The philological studies carried out up to the present have not produced evidence of Romanian words in the spoken language of the Gypsies in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Greek and Slavonic elements, on the other hand, are numerous, proving that the Gypsies did live for a time in Byzantium and the Balkans.

  • 71 See K. Erdôs, “A Classification of Gypsies in Hungary”, Acta Ethnographica, 6 (1958), pp. 450–454.

46The territory of Romania did not constitute a stage in the migration of the Gypsies into Central and Western Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We do, however, note that movements of Gypsies from the Romanian principalities into surrounding territories were taking place virtually all the time. A possible cause for this could be the state of slavery imposed on the Gypsies. Such movements were likely to have been facilitated by the nomadic way of life of the majority of these Gypsies. Documents attest to the crossing of the Carpathians from Wallachia and Moldavia into Transylvania and Hungary, but here it is largely a question of individual action, and in many cases the fugitive was returned to his masters. The scale of these movements was in any case small. In some periods, however, there were crossings in the opposite direction from Transylvania into the principalities. If we consider the Gypsies living in Hungary today, with the exception of those who speak Romanian as their mother tongue, Romanian elements can only be found in the dialect spoken by the so-called “Vlach Gypsies” (oláh cigányok), who are considered to have settled here later on, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.71 The language spoken by the Hungarian Gypsies of the first wave does not contain Romanian ele­ments. The Gypsies who reached Hungary at the beginning of the fifteenth century (or perhaps even at the end of the fourteenth century) arrived there straight from the Balkan Peninsula. Even if it is conceivable that a part of them passed through Wallachia and Transylvania, they did not remain there for long. Sometime later, some groups of Gypsies moved from Moldavia into neighbouring southern Poland. However, the first Gypsies to arrive in Poland came from Germany and Hungary. Around 1500, Gypsies also appeared in southern Russia, seemingly having travelled there from Moldavia.

  • 72 Cf. H. M. G. Grellman, op. cit., pp. 179, 182.

47The fact that in the mid-sixteenth century the scholar Pierre Belon de Mans sought the country of origin of the Gypsies in Bulgaria and Wallachia and his contemporary Jean Brodeau (Brodaeus) believed that the Gypsies were Romanians (Walachi),72 has no connection with the supposed stay of the Gypsies in the Romanian principalities. These were just two of the tens of attempts, of the most lurid nature, made at that time to explain the origins of this population.

Notes

* Szekely—a Hungarian-speaking people akin to the Magyars, settled as frontier guards of the Kingdom of Hungary in the early Middle Ages.

1 A list of these hypotheses can be found in J-P. Clébert, Les Tziganes, Paris, 1961, pp. 15–40; F. de Vaux de Foletier, Mille ans d’histoire des Tsiganes, Paris, 1970, pp. 18–25.

2 H. M. G. Grellmann, Die Zigeuner. Ein historischer Versuch über die Lebensart und Verfassung, Sitten und Schicksahle dieses Volks in Europa, nebst ihrem Ursprunge, Dessau und Leipzig, 1783, pp. 216–260.

3 The results of research carried out until the present synthesised by H. Arnold, Die Zigeuner. Herkunft und Leben der Stämme in deutschen Sprachgebiet, Olten und Freiburg im Breisgau, 1965, pp. 15–22 (with a bibliography in the notes); see also J. Bloch, Les Tsiganes, Paris, 1953, pp. 19–25; A. Fraser, The Gypsies, Oxford UK, Cambridge USA, 1992, pp. 10–32.

4 F. Miklosich, Über die Mundarten unde die Wanderungen der Zigeuner Europa’s, vol. iii, Wien, 1873 (extract from Denkschriften der Philosophisch–Historischen Klasse der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, XXIII, 1873).

5 From literature regarding the migration of the Gypsies in Europe: C. Hopf, Die Einwanderung der Zigeuner in Europa, Gotha, 1870; A. Colocci, Gli Zingari. Storia d’un popolo errante, Turin, 1889, pp. 33–66; J-P Clébert, op. cit.,. pp. 48–57; H. Arnold, op. cit., pp. 22–32; F. de Vaux de Foletier, op. cit., pp. 29–57; J-P. Liégeois, Tsiganes, Paris, 1983, p. 14ff; A. Fraser, op. cit., pp. 33–84; G. Soulis, “The Gypsies in the Byzantine Empire and the Balkans in the Late Middle Ages”, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 1961, pp. 141–165; G. Puxon, “Romite vo Makedonija i Vizantija”, Glasnik Instituta za nacionalna istorija, XVIII/2, Skopje, 1974, pp. 81–94.

6 See F. Miklosich, “Über den Ursprung des Wortes ‘Zigeuner’”, in Über die Mundarten, VI (Vienna, 1876), pp. 57–66.

7 Ilse Rochow, K-P. Matschke, “Neues zu den Zigeunern im byzantinischen Reich um die Wende vom 13. zum 14. Jahrhundert”, Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik, 41 (1991), pp. 241ff.

8 G. Soulis, op. cit., pp. 145–147.

9 B. P. Hasdeu, “Rosturile unei cǎrt,i de donat,iune de pe la anul 1348, emanatǎde la împǎratul sârbesc Dus,an s,i relativǎ la starea socialǎ a românilor de peste Dunǎre”, in Arhiva istoricǎ a României, vol. III, Bucharest, 1867, p. 120.

10 Dj. Petrovic´, “Cigani u srednjiovekovnom Dubrovniku”, Zbornik Filozofskog fakulteta, XIII/1, Belgrade, 1976, pp. 123–158.

11 Gr. A. Ilinski, Gramoty bolgarskich carei, Moscow, 1911, pp. 26–28.

12 See the following sub-chapter.

13 E. de Hurmuzaki, Documente privitoare la istoria românilor, vol. I/2, ed. N. Densus,ianu, Bucharest, 1890, pp. 527 (with the incorrect year: 1423). (Hereafter Hurmuzaki.)

14 J. Vekerdi, “Earliest Archival Evidence on Gypsies in Hungary”, Journal of the Gypsy Lord Society, 4th Series, 1 (1977), no. 3, pp. 170–172 (hereafter this journal will be abbreviated JGLS [(1]), [(2]), [(3]), [(4]) or [(5]) according to the series cited); Mezey B., L. Pomogyi, J. Tauber, A magyarországi cigánykérdés dokumentumokban, 1422–1985, Budapest, 1986, pp. 6–7.

15 See F. de Vaux de Foletier, op. cit., pp. 44ff.

16 A. Fraser, op. cit., pp. 81–82.

17 The meaning of the word Rom is that of “Roman”, Romaíos, a name that was in general applied to the population of the Byzantine Empire. The Gypsies assumed this name during their long sojourn in the Empire. See A.T. Sinclair, “The Word ‘Rom’”, JGLS (2), 3 (1909–1910), pp. 33–42.

18 “[…] generacio una parva sive populus, disperses per orbem […]. Vocantur Cyngani sive populus Pharaonis […]”; Anton Kern, Miszellen aus einem Text vom Jahre 1404: a) Erdöl im Kaukasus, b) Zigeuner, c) Krimgoten, Vienna, 1948 (extract from Frühgeschichte und Sprachwissenschaft), p. 153.

19 See further on pp. 120ff.

20 Documenta Romaniae Historica, B, T,ara Româneascǎ, vol. I, Bucharest, 1966, pp. 19–22. (Hereafter DRH, B)

21 E. Lǎzǎrescu, “Nicodim de la Tismana şi rolul sǎu în cultura veche româneascǎ”, Romano-slavica XI (1965), pp. 237ff.

22 DRH, B, I, pp. 17–19; the document is dated, we believe, incorrectly as “‹1374›”.

23 Ibid., pp. 22–25, 33–36, 39–42, 154–156.

24 Ibid., pp. 25–28. Confirmations in ‹1392›, ‹1421› (where only 45 families of Gypsies are mentioned), 1443 (50 families), 1451 (50 families), 1475 (300 fami­lies), 1478 (350 families), 1488 (300 families); ibid., pp. 42–45, 98–100, 167– 168, 187–188, 247–250, 265–268, 337–341.

25 Documenta Romaniae Historica A, Moldova, vol., I, Bucharest, 1975, pp. 109–110. (Hereafter DRH, A.)

26 Ibid., pp. 124–126.

27 Ibid., p. 184.

28 Ibid., p. 185.

29 DRH, B, I, pp. 32–33.

30 J. Vekerdi, op. cit.

31 It has been stated that the Gypsies were present in the Romanian Plain even during the time of the Pechenegs and the Cumans, with whom they supposedly arrived in the area, in other words from the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Al. Gonţa, Satul în Moldova medievalǎ. Instituţiile, Bucharest, 1986, p. 315).

32 N. Iorga, Anciens documents de droit roumain, Paris–Bucharest, 1930, pp. 22–23.

33 T. G. Bulat, “T,iganii domnes,ti, din Moldova, la 1810”, Arhivele Basarabiei, IV (1933), no. 2, p. 1; I. Peretz, Robia (course), Bucharest, 1934, p. 59; G. Potra, Contribut,iuni la istoricul t,iganilor din România, Bucharest, 1939, pp. 17–18, 26; N. Grigoras,, “Robia în Moldova (De la întemeierea statului pâna˘ la mijlocul secolului al XVIII-lea) (I)”, Anuarul Institutului de istorie s,i arheologie “A. D. Xenopol”, IV (1967), p. 34.

34 Ibid.

35 DRH, A, I, p. 23.

36 Ibid., pp. 44–45.

37 Ibid., pp. 88–89.

38 I. R. Mircea, “Termenii rob, şerbşi holop în documentele slave şi române”, Studiişi cercetǎri ştiinţifice, Iaşi (1950), p. 863.

39 See I. Peretz, op. cit., pp. 46–58.

40 N. Beldiceanu, Irène Beldiceanu-Steinherr, “Notes sur le Bir, les esclaves tatars et quelques charges dans les pays Roumains”, Journal of Turkish Studies, vol. 10, 1986 (Essays presented to Halil Inalcik on his seventieth birthday), pp. 12–13.

41 In Moldavia already in the first document to mention them (from 1428), while in Wallachian documents for the first time in 1478 (DRH, B, I, pp. 265–268).

42 L. Toppeltinus, Origines et occasus Transsilvanorum seu erutae nationes Transsylvaniae…, Lugdunum (Lyon), 1667, p. 55.

43 N. Grigoras,, op. cit., pp. 37–38.

44 Cǎlǎtori strǎini despre ţǎrile române, vol. I, ed. Maria Holban, Bucharest, 1968, pp. 112–113.

45 N. Grigoras,, op. cit., pp. 34–36.

46 Cronicile slavo-române din sec. xvxvi, publicate de Ion Bogdan, ed. P. P. Panaitescu, Bucharest, 1959, p. 30.

47 See G. Potra, op. cit., p. 28

48 G. Soulis, op. cit., pp. 151–152.

49 See above note 9.

50 For events in the region during this period, see particularly Maria Holban, “Contribuţii la studiul raporturilor dintre T,ara Româneascǎşi Ungaria angevinǎ (Rolul lui Benedict Himfy în legǎturǎ cu problema Vidinului)”, in Din cronica relat,iilor româno-ungare în secolele xiiixiv, Bucharest, 1981, pp. 126–154.

51 Mauro Orbini, Il regno degli Slavi, hoggi corrotamente deti Schiavoni…, Pessaro, 1601, p. 470; cf. E. Lǎzǎrescu, op. cit., p. 261, note 6.

52 N. Grigoras, op. cit., pp. 36–38.

53 D. Cantemir, Descrierea Moldovei, trad. Gh. Guţu, Bucharest, 1973, p. 297.

54 Urkundenbuch zur Geschichte der Deutschen in Siebenbürgen, vol. vii, Bucharest, 1991, p. 113; A. Gebora, Situat,ia juridica˘ a t,iganilor în Ardeal, Bucharest, 1932, pp. 13–16.

55 Hurmuzaki, XV/1, p. 152.

56 Maja Philippi, “Die Bevölkerung Kronstadts im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert. Siedlungsverhältnisse und ethnische Zusammensetzung”, in Beiträge zur Geschichte von Kronstadt in Siebenbürgen, ed. P. Philippi, Cologne, Vienna, 1984, pp. 142–143.

57 S. Márki, Arad vármegye története, vol. II, Arad, 1892, pp. 503–504.

58 Nicolae Stoica de Haţeg, Cronica Banatului, ed. D. Mioc, Bucharest, 1969, p. 48.

59 1442: “Czigan Karacion jobagio”; 1450: “Czigan Nan” (I. Mihály, Diplome maramures,ene din secolul al xiv-lea–xv, Sighetul Marmaţiei, 1900, pp. 321, 343).

60 Caǎlǎtori strǎini despre ţǎrile române, vol. ii, ed. Maria Holban, M. M Alexan-drescu-Dersca Bulgaru, P. Cernovodeanu, Bucharest, 1970, p. 322.

61 L. Toppeltinus, op. cit., p. 55.

62 Cluj’s town council took just such a measure in 1585, when it decided to demolish the huts constructed some time earlier by Gypsies who had arrived from other areas, since the huts represented a permanent fire hazard (A. Gebora, op. cit., p. 26).

63 B. Mezey et al., op. cit., p. 10.

64 N. Grigoras,, op. cit., pp. 37, 75.

65 Hurmuzaki, II/2, p. 530.

66 N. Grigoras,, op. cit., p. 37.

67 C. Hopf, op. cit., especially pp. 23, 25–26.

68 See G. Soulis, op. cit., p. 162.

69 Fr. Miklosich, Über die Mundarten, III, pp. 13–16.

70 See below, pp. 120ff.

71 See K. Erdôs, “A Classification of Gypsies in Hungary”, Acta Ethnographica, 6 (1958), pp. 450–454.

72 Cf. H. M. G. Grellman, op. cit., pp. 179, 182.

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