The Gypsies of Early Modern Spain

"This book looks at Spanish archives and is really a model for writing Romani history. To write a book on the Romani experience in Spain, not only do you need fluency in Spanish, but you also need to be able to recognise when Romani people are being referred to in the documents. They do not call them by the name the Roma call themselves and they very rarely site anything in the Romani language. Spanish sources, as did most of Europe in this period, also generally refer to Romani people as Egyptians. The history of the Roma in Spain is one full of edicts expelling them wholesale from specific provinces time and time again. This was especially the case after economic and military crises when there was a pervading sense of insecurity. The major concern of the authorities was that the indigenous Spanish population would actually join the Roma communities. This comes up often in these edicts and penalties would be imposed on people who were caught associating with them. So, it seems the Romani people were tolerated in particular occupations in the economy but that the Spanish authorities feared that the local population would take on their ways if they associated too much with them. Therefore through that, there was a general association between attitudes to Romani people and crime prevention. Basically, the preoccupation with the Roma became a preoccupation with crime prevention, because people lacking a steady domicile were regarded as having a propensity to crime. This led to a vicious circle: expulsion led to nomadism, which was then criminalised. However, one of really interesting things that Pym observes is that most of the expulsion orders do not seem to have been followed through. They are repeated year after year in the same provinces, and it seems that nothing was really done to enforce them. Today, you still have a Romani population of about half a million in Spain. This is partly because the Romani people were very effective in moving back and forth across the borders of the various provinces to avoid trouble and also because they were able to seek protection from their persecutors. During the Spanish Inquisition they were protected by local noble men and even local clergy in various places, who either sympathised with their plight or who were able to extract financial benefit by helping them. The reason that many Roma moved to Andalucia in southern Spain seems to be because there were much larger estates there, so they had much more freedom to move about without being noticed by the authorities. That region also had many people of Muslim descent who were also regarded with suspicion during the inquisition, so the Roma were not being singled out for persecution there."