Verisoph story dossier
The history of the Roma, a people whose Indian origin is written in their language: the migration through Persia and Byzantium, arrival in Europe by the 1400s, and the 'Egyptian' misnomer that gave 'Gypsy'...
The history of the Roma, a people whose Indian origin is written in their language: the migration through Persia and Byzantium, arrival in Europe by the 1400s, and the 'Egyptian' misnomer that gave 'Gypsy'; then centuries of persecution, five hundred years of slavery in Wallachia and Moldavia, and the Porajmos.
32 newly added in the last 14 days
The Roma trace their origin to the Indian subcontinent, a conclusion drawn mainly from language. The Romani language shares its core vocabulary and grammar with Indic languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, and Punjabi, and later genetic studies point to the same region. The date of the first migration out of India is not documented and is estimated by scholars, commonly placed around the year 1000.
As they moved west, the Roma spent generations in Persia and neighboring lands. Romani absorbed a layer of Persian, Armenian, and Kurdish loanwords, which linguists use to reconstruct the route and rough timing of the migration. This stage left no written records of the people themselves, so the evidence is almost entirely linguistic.
By the 11th and 12th centuries Roma groups had reached Byzantine territory in Anatolia and the Balkans, where Romani took on a strong layer of Greek vocabulary. A Byzantine term for them, atsinganoi, is widely thought to be the root of many European names for the Roma, including the German Zigeuner, French Tsigane, and Italian Zingaro. The word carried a sense of a suspect outsider group.
Some of the earliest firm written mentions of Roma in Europe come from the early 14th century, including a friar's note of a nomadic people on Crete around 1322 and records from Serbia and the Balkans soon after. These early notices are brief and often curious rather than hostile. They mark the point where the Roma enter the written history of Europe.
The earliest documents that mention Roma in the Romanian principalities already describe them as slaves, including a grant of Roma to the monastery of Tismana confirmed around 1385. From the start, then, the Roma in Wallachia and Moldavia appear in the record as owned property rather than free people. This began roughly five centuries of Roma slavery in the region.
Chronicles record bands of Roma arriving in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire in 1417, led by men styled as dukes and counts and carrying letters of safe conduct. They often presented themselves as Christian pilgrims doing penance, a story that won them shelter and alms at first. Within a generation the welcome curdled into suspicion across much of Europe.
When Roma reached Paris in 1427, a witness known as the Bourgeois of Paris recorded their claim to be penitents from a land called Little Egypt. The belief that they came from Egypt spread widely and gave English the word Gypsy, along with the Spanish Gitano. The label was a mistake; their roots lay in India, not Egypt. Gypsy is now widely treated as a slur, and most communities prefer Roma or Romani.
The imperial Diet meeting at Freiburg declared the Roma outlaws and accused them of spying for the Ottoman Turks. The ruling stripped them of legal protection, so that a Roma could in principle be robbed or killed without penalty. It was reaffirmed at later imperial diets and set the tone for two centuries of anti-Roma law in the German lands.
Across the Romanian principalities, Roma slaves were owned in three broad classes: by the crown, by monasteries, and by the boyar nobility. Slaves could be bought, sold, given away, and punished, and their status passed to their children. This long history of Roma enslavement lasted into the 19th century and is often left out of general accounts of European slavery.
King Louis XII ordered the Roma out of France, one of a wave of national expulsion decrees issued across Europe in the early 16th century. Such orders were repeated many times over the following centuries, which suggests they were widely ignored or impossible to enforce. Repeated expulsion became a standard tool of policy toward the Roma.
The Egyptians Act of 1530 barred Roma from entering England and ordered those already present to leave within sixteen days or forfeit their goods. It was part of a broader European drive to bar and expel the Roma. The law treated the whole group as criminal by definition rather than for any specific act.
A further Egyptians Act passed under Queen Mary I made it a felony punishable by death for Roma to remain in England for more than a month. A 1562 amendment under Elizabeth I softened it only for those who gave up a traveling life. For a time, simply being Roma in England could carry a death sentence.
A Swedish decree of 1637 ordered the Roma out of the realm and provided that Roma men who remained could be hanged without trial. Similar death-penalty measures appeared in several states, turning mere presence into a capital offense. Enforcement was uneven, but the laws made the Roma permanent fugitives in the eyes of the state.
Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI issued an order that has been read as calling for the extermination of the Roma in his lands. Accounts describe men being executed and women and children flogged, branded, and banished. Branding and mutilation as marks of identity were used against the Roma in several German states in this period. The order shows how far official hostility had hardened.
On 30 July 1749 the Spanish state, under the Marquis of Ensenada and King Ferdinand VI, carried out a coordinated mass arrest of Roma known as the Gran Redada, or Great Round-up. Estimates of those seized range from roughly nine thousand to twelve thousand people, split up by sex to prevent them having children and put to forced labor. It was one of the most systematic anti-Roma actions before the 20th century.
Beginning in 1758, Empress Maria Theresa issued decrees meant to erase the Roma as a distinct people in the Habsburg lands. They were forced to settle, barred from owning horses and wagons, forbidden to use the Romani language, and renamed New Hungarians or New settlers. The goal was assimilation by command rather than expulsion, but it was still coercion aimed at wiping out a culture.
Later Habsburg measures went further, forbidding marriage between Roma and ordering that Roma children be removed from their parents and handed to non-Roma families to be raised. Taking children was meant to break the transmission of language and identity between generations. It is one of the clearest early examples of assimilation pursued through the family itself.
Emperor Joseph II issued a detailed Gypsy Regulation that tightened his mother's assimilation program. It controlled where Roma could live and work, pressed them into settled trades and military service, and continued to suppress their language and customs. The decrees framed all of this as civilizing the Roma, a word that masked the erasure of a people's way of life.
Pressure from a reform-minded generation led the principalities to begin freeing Roma slaves in stages during the 1840s, starting with those owned by the state and the church. Writers and activists cast Roma slavery as a national shame that had to end. These partial measures set the ground for full abolition a decade later.
Moldavia in 1855 and Wallachia in 1856 abolished Roma slavery outright, ending roughly five centuries of legal bondage. Freed families often left with little land or means, and many stayed poor and marginal for generations. The abolition is a major event in European history that remains little known outside the region.
also in Nazi ideology was not unique: race myth, empire, and extermination
Bavaria set up a special police office in Munich to track and register Roma, gathering names, photographs, and fingerprints. Run for years by the official Alfred Dillmann, it treated the Roma as a standing security problem to be catalogued. The files and methods it built up were later available to the Nazi state.
also in Nazi ideology was not unique: race myth, empire, and extermination
Under the Nazis, the Roma were classed both as asocial and as racially inferior. The psychiatrist Robert Ritter and his Racial Hygiene Research Unit examined and catalogued Roma to sort them by supposed racial type, work that fed later deportation lists. Around the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Roma in the capital were rounded up into a guarded camp at Marzahn. Forced sterilizations of Roma followed under the regime's racial laws.
In December 1938 Heinrich Himmler issued a decree on combating what it called the Gypsy plague, ordering that the Roma be registered and handled on racial grounds. It pulled earlier local persecution into a single national, racial framework. The decree marked a step from harassment toward the systematic policy that led to genocide.
also in Nazi ideology was not unique: race myth, empire, and extermination
On 16 December 1942 Himmler ordered that Roma from across the German-controlled Reich be deported to Auschwitz. The order set in motion the mass transport of Roma families to the death camp. It is a central document of the Porajmos, the Roma word for the genocide, meaning the devouring.
From February 1943 deported Roma were held together in a special section of Auschwitz-Birkenau known as the Zigeunerlager, or Gypsy family camp. Conditions were deadly, and thousands died of starvation, disease, and medical experiments, including those carried out by Josef Mengele. Unlike most prisoners, Roma were kept in family groups, which is one reason survivors could later document what happened.
also in Nazi ideology was not unique: race myth, empire, and extermination
On the night of 2 to 3 August 1944 the SS killed the remaining Roma in the Auschwitz family camp in the gas chambers, roughly three thousand people, after an earlier attempt in May had been met with resistance from the prisoners. This date is now marked as Roma Holocaust Remembrance Day. It stands for the destruction of Roma communities across Nazi-occupied Europe.
Estimates of Roma killed in the Porajmos are usually given as 250,000 to 500,000, though the true number is uncertain and some scholars, such as Ian Hancock, argue it was far higher, possibly over a million. Poor records and the murder of whole communities make a precise count impossible. For decades after the war the genocide went largely unrecognized, and West German courts long denied survivors compensation by claiming the Roma had been persecuted as criminals rather than on racial grounds.
On 8 April 1971 Roma delegates from several countries met near London for the first World Romani Congress. They adopted a common flag, blue over green with a red spoked wheel, and an anthem, Gelem, Gelem, and pressed the name Roma in place of outsider labels. The date is now marked as International Roma Day, and the congress is seen as the birth of a modern transnational Roma movement.
In 1982 Chancellor Helmut Schmidt formally acknowledged that the Nazi persecution of the Roma had been a racially motivated genocide. The statement came almost four decades after the war, following years of campaigning by Roma activists. Official recognition opened the way, slowly, to memorials and some measure of redress.
Roma women were sterilized without proper consent under state programs that began in communist Czechoslovakia and, in documented cases, continued in the Czech Republic and Slovakia into the 1990s and 2000s. Sweden's own sterilization program, which also affected Roma and Travellers, ran until the 1970s. Governments later apologized and, in some cases, set up compensation, but recognition came slowly and only after long campaigns by survivors.
In the case of D.H. and Others v. the Czech Republic, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2007 that routinely placing Roma children in schools for pupils with learning disabilities was unlawful discrimination. The judgment named a pattern found in several countries, where Roma children were separated from their peers and given a lesser education. Segregation in schools has continued in practice despite the ruling.
In 2010 the French government under President Nicolas Sarkozy cleared hundreds of Roma camps and deported many Roma, mostly Romanian and Bulgarian citizens, back to their countries. The campaign drew sharp criticism from the European Union and rights groups as collective punishment aimed at an ethnic group. It highlighted how Roma across Europe still faced eviction and expulsion in the 21st century.
Linked to "Demographics and family" as part of in this story