‘Pharaoh was bad enough, nevertheless he judged that the children of Israel were dangerous to the state, because they appeared to him to be living without any certain occupation; and for this very reason the Chaldeans cast them out of Babylon. Amasis, king of Egypt, drove all the vagrants from his kingdom, forbidding them to return under pain of death. The Soldan of Egypt expelled the Torlaquis. The Moors did the same; and Bajazet cast them out of all the Ottoman empire, according to Leo Clavius.
‘In the second place, the Christian princes have deemed it an important measure of state.
‘The emperor our Lord, in the German Diets of the year 1548, expelled the Gitános from all his empire, and these were the words of the decree: “Zigeuner quos compertum est proditores esse, et exploratores hostium nusquam in imperio locum inveniunto. In deprehensos vis et injuria sine fraude esto. Fides publica Zigeuners ne dator, nec data servator.”
‘The King of France, Francis, expelled them from thence; and the Duke of Terranova, when Governor of Milan for our lord the king, obliged them to depart from that territory under pain of death.
‘Thirdly, there is one grand reason which ought to be conclusive in moving him who so much values himself in being a faithful son of the church,—I mean the example which Pope Pius the Fifth gave to all the princes; for he drove the Gitános from all his domains, and in the year 1568, he expelled the Jews, assigning as reasons for their expulsion those which are more closely applicable to the Gitános;—namely, that they sucked the vitals of the state, without being of any utility whatever; that they were thieves themselves, and harbourers of others; that they were wizards, diviners, and wretches who induced people to believe that they knew the future, which is what the Gitános at present do by telling fortunes.
‘Your Majesty has already freed us from greater and more dangerous enemies; finish, therefore, the enterprise begun, whence will result universal joy and security, and by which your Majesty will earn immortal honour. Amen.
‘O Regum summe, horum plura ne temnas (absit) ne fortè tempsisse Hispaniæ periculosum existat.’
PERHAPS there is no country in which more laws have been framed, having in view the extinction and suppression of the Gypsy name, race, and manner of life, than Spain. Every monarch, during a period of three hundred years, appears at his accession to the throne to have considered that one of his first and most imperative duties consisted in suppressing or checking the robberies, frauds, and other enormities of the Gitános, with which the whole country seems to have resounded since the time of their first appearance.