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.