The Origins of Anti-Gypsyism: The Outsiders’ View of Romanies in Western Europe in the Fifteenth Century

Summary

In this chapter I shall concentrate on the years 1400–1450 when Gypsies in large numbers first arrived in western Europe. The generally held opinion in the field of Gypsy Studies is that there then occurred an invasion of a large group of Romanies, who pretended to be refugees while indulging in pickpocketing and shoplifting. This view is based on a variety of sources reproduced in the pages of the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society during the last century. But if historians of the future based their research on the popular press, we might get a similar impression of the situation today. In both cases we are in fact looking at a situation where the largely misreported behaviour of a small minority outweighs the generally unreported un-newsworthy lives of the majority – at that time the thousands of Romanies working as craftspeople and fieldworkers in central and eastern Europe.

This is a period in which we have no poems, plays or fiction mentioning Gypsies. The literary stereotype of Gypsies had not yet evolved. We have to wait until 1450 for the first Gypsy character in literature, when a foolish (närrisch) male fortune-teller appears in a Swiss play (see Gilsenbach 1994: 86), while the first picture – a simple portrait of a couple and their children – dates from 1480 in Amsterdam (Gilsenbach 1994: 100). The image of the Gypsy in this period is, rather, to be found in historical chronicles and town council records. These created an image – based on a select minority – that has survived to the present day. As sources of this image I am considering only contemporary writers and the records made by council clerks of their ‘emergency payments’ to indigent visitors to their towns. Chroniclers describing contemporary events of which they were first-hand observers are rare – four, in fact: Conrad Justinger (d. 1426), Clerk to Berne Council; the monk Hermann Korner (d. c. 1437); a ‘Gentleman of Paris’ writing in 1427; and an anonymous chronicler from Bologna (see Gilsenbach 1994: 57, 49, 62, 68–69). A second cleric, Andreas (Gilsenbach 1994: 65), belongs to the period, but seems to have written partly what he was told by someone else rather than what he himself had seen.