served as slaves of slaves' (ed. Bezold). There is no other mention of a dispersion of this people, who of all nations are perhaps the least disturbed in their primitive habitat; but in Asia Minor (in Rum as it was later called) a legend must have been current, transferred to the heretical nomads. That anyone should doubt the origin of romani from Rum or the Empire (on either side of Hellespont) seems unlikely.[1] From Rum they would seem to have travelled west somewhere about 1400. Already there were Gipsies in Corfu before 1326 (Hopf) and in 1346 Catherine of Valois gave leave for their reduction to vassalage; in 1386, under the Venetians was formed the Gipsy Fief (feudum Acindanorum). At Nauplia the Venetian governor confirmed the privileges granted by his predecessor to the Gipsy leader John.[2] When our old friend Friar Simeon visited Crete in 1322 he saw there nomads who worshipped according to the Greek rite but professed themselves sons of Ham, living in tents like Arabs and moving on 'like a cursed people' from place to place, after no more than a month's sojourn. There are plentiful proofs of their serfage or vassalage in Wallachia and Moldavia after 1400 (cf. Gaster's hst, E.Br. xii. 38); they were bought and sold as late as 1848 in Bucharest. They arrived in Hesse, some say in 1414, and three years later their presence was recognised all through the Germanic Empire:[3] by 1428 we find them in Switzerland and
- ↑ But Gaster, rather strangely, 'ventures' on it as a 'new explanation,' E.Br. s.v.: I am amused at his "as the Byz. used to call themselves before they assumed the prouder name of Hellenes." Nothing is clearer or more remarkable than the disparaging use of this name by the political and military parties in the Empire during its greatest days: the name Greek was almost treated as a term of contumely, and Greeks were carefully kept out of all chief offices in the State.
- ↑ Not, as we shall see, a gipsy himself.
- ↑ They seem to have been regarded as holy pilgrims: (1) 1416, the municipal council of Kronstadt in Transylvania, voted money, corn and poultry to 'Lord Emaus from Egypt,' and his 220 comrades. (2) 1417, a count in Transylvania
