owned by noble or convent, or nomads and vagrants. Some few had a homestead of their own, laeshi or vatrashi. Each community shatra was under a judge or captain, jude (judex) in Rumanian, aga (Turkish) in Magyar: these again were subject to the voivode or bulubasha (also Turkish), who was appointed by the yuzbasha, a Wallachian noble named by the hospodar. The race was treated as 'crown domain,' the prince's personal property and the yuzb. was responsible for the licences and capitation-tax levied on the nomad gipsies. Thus the chief officials were always aliens and often treated their subjects harshly; in Poland the last 'gipsy king' or krolestvo cyganskie died in 1790.[1] As we saw, Joseph II. proclaimed freedom in Hungary and Transylvania (1782) but the Rumanian robi were bought, sold and bequeathed down to 1856. Only since 1866 have they become citizens of the new kingdom, and are being slowly assimilated, even forgetting their own language. In Bulgaria the Berlin Treaty gave gipsies equal rights (1878), but the concession seems to have been withheld: in 1906 a gipsy Congress was held at Sofia, to claim political equality for the Turkish branch or Gopti; the tzaribashi or president redacted any petition addressed to the Bulgarian parliament (Sobranye).
Have they any Peculiar Tenets in Religion?
15. As to their peculiar tenets, Gaster suggests that they have no ethical principles, recognise no Decalogue
- ↑ From cent. xvi. till the end of the kingdom, the Polish Chancellor appointed a regent from the members of the slachta: they were supreme judges, and made laws for gipsies, with right of levying taxes and punishing crime. Thewrewk de Ponor tells us (Jl. G. Lore, ii. 148f.) that the gipsy captaincy in Hungary was a privilege vested in the nobility, bestowed by the crown as a reward of merit, carrying with it jura prærogativa fructus et emolumenta. In early days it was often hereditary. Ladislaus, Sigismund's grantee in 1423, certainly had predecessors in the honour among his own kinsmen, as appears from documents of 1336, 1373, 1377; in the first, 'Domenick Czigani' is called homo regius, and the two latter refer to his son as Ladislaus Czigani.
