In Corfu.
The Empress Catherine de Courtenay-Valois (1301–46), granted to the suzerains of Corfu authority to receive as vassals certain ‘homines vageniti,’ coming from the Greek mainland, and using the Greek rite. By the close of the fourteenth century these vageniti were all of them subject to a single baron, Gianuli de Abitabulo, and formed the nucleus of a fief called the fief of Abitabulo or feudum Acinganorum, which lasted under various superiors until the abolition of feudal tenures in the beginning of the present century. One of those superiors, [[xx]]about 1540, was the learned Antonio Eparco, Melanchthon’s correspondent; another, the tyrannical Count Teodoro Michele, who died in 1787. This little Gypsy colony, numbering about a hundred adults, besides children, had a tax to pay twice a year to their superior, as also such fines as two gold pieces and a couple of fat hens for permission to marry. They were mechanics, smiths, tinkers, and husbandmen; celebrated a great yearly festival on the first of May; and were amenable only to the jurisdiction of their lord. Carl Hopf, in Die Einwanderung der Zigeuner in Europa (Gotha, 1870, pp. 17–23), tells us much about them, collected from the papers of Count Teodoro Trivoli, who succeeded to the property in 1863. Still we would fain know much more, especially something as to their language. One point to be noticed is that Italians must in Corfu have come early in contact with Gypsies, for the island belonged to Venice from 1401 to 1797.
In the Peloponnesus.
From a Venetian viceroy, moreover, Ottaviano Buono, the Acingani of Nauplion in the Peloponnesus received about 1398 a confirmation of the privileges granted them by his predecessors; and Hopf from two facts infers that Gypsies must have been early settled in the peninsula—one, the frequency of ruins called Gyphtokastron (‘Gypsy fortress’); the other, that in 1414 the Byzantine rhetorician Mazaris[5] reckoned Egyptians as one of the seven races dwelling there. Nauplion is on the east coast, Modone on the west; and at Modone the Cologne patrician, Arnold von Harff, who went on pilgrimage 1496–99, found a whole suburb of ‘poor naked people in little reed-thatched houses, well on to three hundred families, called Suyginer, the same as those whom we call Heiden (Heathen) from Egypt, and who wander about in our lands. Here the race plies all sorts of handiwork—shoemaking, cobbling, and also the smith’s craft, which is right curious to behold. The anvil stands on the ground, the man sat in front of it, like a tailor with us; near him sat his wife, also on the earth, and span. Between them was the fire. Near it were two little leather bags, like a bagpipe’s, half in the ground and pointing towards the fire. So the wife, as she sat and span, sometimes lifted up one of the bags and then pressed it down again; this sent wind through the earth to the fire, so that the man could get on with his tinkering.’ Harff then says that the race originates from a [[xxi]]country called Gyppe, some forty miles distant from Modone. ‘Sixty years ago’ [i.e. about 1436] ‘the Turkish emperor seized this territory, whereupon some counts and lords, who would not submit to his authority, fled to Rome to our spiritual father, and demanded his comfort and succour. So he gave them commendatory letters to the Roman emperor and to all princes of the empire, to render them conduct and assistance as exiles for the Christian faith. But though they showed the letters to all princes, they found nowhere assistance. So they died in wretchedness, but the letters passed to their servants and children, who still wander about in our lands, and call themselves from Little Egypt. But that is a lie, for their parents came from the territory of Gyppe, called also Suginia, which is not so far from our city of Cologne as it is from Egypt. But these vagabonds are rascals and spy out the lands.’ This passage, modernised from Harff’s narrative by Hopf (pp. 14–17), is of high interest, though there was no Turkish occupation of the Morea about 1436, and though we know of no territory there called Gyppe or Suginia.
In Roumania.
In 1387 Mircea I., woiwode of Wallachia, by a charter still preserved in the archives of Bucharest, renewed a grant made about 1370 by his uncle Vladislav to the monastery of St Anthony at Voditza of forty salaschi (‘tents’ or families) of Atsegane. Which shows that already the Roumanian Gypsies were serfs; and serfs they continued till 1856. To the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society (vol. i., Lond., 1857, pp. 37–41) Mr. Samuel Gardner, H.M. Consul at Jassy, contributed some interesting ‘Notes on the Condition of the Gypsy Population of Moldavia.’ ‘The Tzigans,’ he says, ‘are an intelligent and industrious race, and in their general condition of prædial slavery (for few are in reality emancipated) are a reproach to the country and to the Government. Many of them are taught arts. They are the blacksmiths, locksmiths, bricklayers, masons, farriers, musicians, and cooks especially, of the whole country.… They dwell in winter in subterranean excavations, the roof alone appearing above ground, and in summer in brown serge tents of their own fabric.… The children, to the age of ten or twelve, are in a complete state of nudity; but the men and women, the latter offering frequently the most symmetrical form and feminine beauty, have a rude clothing. Their implements and carriages, of a peculiar construction, display much ingenuity. They are in fact very able artisans and labourers, industrious and active, but are cruelly and barbarously treated. In the houses of their masters they are employed in the lowest offices, live in the cellars, have the lash continually applied to them, and are still subjected to the iron collar and a kind of spiked iron mask or [[xxii]]helmet, which they are obliged to wear as a mark of punishment and degradation for every petty offence.’ The Gypsies of Wallachia and Moldavia are referred to in eleven original documents of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Every one of these documents speaks of them as serfs, but we get never a hint of when they were first reduced to serfdom.