That many of the persecuted outcasts were compelled to fly the country we shall see presently in the Morerias of Brazil; and when religious zeal cooled down, political interests took its place, and led to the great legal persecution. Philip IV. in 1633 prohibited the Gypsy dress and dialect, expelled them from the Ghettos, and by rendering intermarriage illegal aimed at fusing the vagrants with other subjects. In 1692 Charles II. ordered them to practise nothing but agriculture. The decree was renewed in 1695, and article 16 threatened punishment to all, gentle and simple, who aided and abetted them. Philip V. in 1726 banished from Madrid certain Gypsy women who had petitioned in favour of their persecuted husbands. Nineteen years afterwards (1745) he ordered the fugitives to return to his dominions under pain of fire and steel, denying to them even the right of asylum in sacred places. This terrible decree was renewed in 1746-49.
Better days now began to dawn. The racial hatred and brutality suffered by the Gypsies became by slow degrees to be considered the abrogations of past ages. Already, in 1783, Don Carlos of Spain followed the Emperor Joseph of Germany, 1782, and revoked the ultra-Draconian laws which aimed at the extinction of a people, and substituted decrees contrasting strongly with the Pragmatica of 1499; he even threatened pains and penalties to those who hindered the Gypsies in their occupations. In fact, the Gitano, no longer the Egipciano, was allowed intermarriage with his caste, his family rights were recognized, and he was allowed to choose his own trade. He was forbidden only to wear any special dress, to display his language in public, or to exercise the ignoble parts of his calling. Briefly, after having been for centuries of persecution a social pariah, he became a subject. The change must be attributed only to the French philosophical school, and the works of the encyclopedists, which presently led to the greatest benefits of modern ages, the first French Revolution of 1789. It made men and citizens where it found serfs and slaves.
These humanitarian measures bore their natural consequences. Under the effect of toleration the Gypsies lost much of the savage wildness which distinguished them in the depths of the Toledo Mountains, the Sierra Morena, and the wild Alpujarras. They flocked to the valleys of the Ebro, the Tagus, and the Guadiana, where many, waxing rich and caring little for a community of goods, lost much of their devotion to caste and their fear and horror of their Christian fellow-citizens. And the grey-beards did not fail to complain that the Zincálo was speedily becoming a Gacho or a Busno, opprobrious terms applied to non-Gypsies.
The Gitanos of Spain are supposed to number from fifty to sixty thousand, and the increased toleration of society is rapidly concentrating them into the great towns. They abound in Madrid, Cadiz, Malaga, Granada, Cordova, Ciudad Real, Murcia, Valencia, Barcelona, Pamplona, Valladolid, and Badajoz. In parts of Upper Aragon and the Alpujarras Mountains they are troglodytes rather than nomad hordes. Even in the northern provinces, Old Castile, Asturias, and Galicia, where they formerly were most hated and feared, they are now freely allowed to settle. A complete assimilation is expected from the position which they have acquired in places like Cadiz and Malaga. They are beginning to educate themselves in a country where hardly 20 per cent. can read, and where a grandee of the last generation was a kind of high-caste chalan (horse-cooper) or torero (bull-fighter)—the Gitano’s peculiar trades. Though they preserve the Gypsy tradition, some of them traffic largely in cattle and own extensive butcheries; they keep inns and taverns; they deal with the chief merchants; and they live in luxury. Gitanos of the poorer classes buy and barter animals; act jockeys and race-riders; people the bull-ring (especially in Andalusia); work nails and ironmongery, as at Granada and Cordova; and plait the coloured baskets for which Murcia, Valencia, and Barcelona are famous. Their women sell poultry and old rags; prepare buns (buñuelos) and black puddings (morcillas de sangre); engage themselves as tavern cooks; are excellent smugglers; and find in interpreting dreams, in philter-selling, and in fortune-telling the most lucrative industries. They sing and play various instruments, accompanying the music with the most voluptuous and licentious dances and attitudes; but woe to the man who would obtain from these Bayaderes any boon beyond their provocative exhibition. From the Indus to Gibraltar the contrast of obscenity in language and in songs with corporal chastity—a lacha ye drupo, “body shame,” as they term it—has ever been a distinctive characteristic. No brothel in Europe can boast of containing a Gypsy woman.[209] The mother carefully watches and teaches her child to preserve the premices for the Rom, the Gypsy husband. At marriages they preserve the old Jewish and Muslim rite, that disappeared from Spain only with the accession of the house of Austria. Even Isabella of Castile, when she was married at Valladolid to Ferdinand of Aragon, allowed her “justificative proofs” to be displayed before the wedding-guest. Gypsy marriages, like those of the high-caste Hindus, entail ruinous expense; the revelry lasts three days; the “Gentile” is freely invited; and the profusion of meats and drinks often makes the bridegroom a debtor for life. I have explained this practice in Hindustan as the desire to prove that the first marriage is the marriage.
The Spanish Gypsies are remarkable for beauty in early youth: for magnificent eyes and hair, regular features, light and well-knit figures, easy gait, and graceful bearing. Their locks, like the Hindus, are lamp-black, and without a sign of wave; and they preserve the characteristic eye. The form is perfect, and it has an especial look to which is attributed the power of engendering grandes passions—one of the privileges of the eye. I have often remarked its fixity and brilliance, which flashes like phosphoric light, the gleam which in some eyes denotes madness. I have also noted the “far-off look” which seems to gaze at something beyond you, and the alternation from the fixed stare to a glazing or filming over of the pupil.[210] Hence the English song:
A Gypsy stripling’s glossy (?) eye
Has pierced my bosom’s core,
A feat no eye beneath the sky
Could e’er effect before.
And in Spain it is remarked that the Gypsy man often makes a conquest of the Busno’s wife.