Another Darkness, Another Dawn Read online

  TWO

  Breaking Bodies, Banishing Bodies

  IF IN THE LAST CHAPTER we saw how the move from the medieval to early modern worlds in Europe saw the arrival of Gypsies coincide with a tightening of attitudes towards strangers, the continued emergence of nation states, new forms of government and responses to vagrants, then the seventeenth century was no less dramatic. These years saw some of the harshest legislation against Gypsies right across Europe and into the New World. This was the era of grotesque physical punishments – mutilations, public torture and executions – as well as ‘Gypsy hunts’ and banishments. It was a time when wars and their consequences wracked much of the Continent, while the Ottoman Empire dominated the Balkans and the Counter-Reformation took hold across Catholic territories. And yet, despite all this, these years saw the acceptance of Gypsies into the everyday worlds of many communities across the Continent, as well as the emergence of distinct Gypsy identities in different parts of the Continent.

  Without doubt, the seventeenth century was a period in which legislation against Gypsies across Europe was exceptionally harsh, and often the history of Gypsies in this period reads as nothing less than a litany of persecution. The territories of the Holy Roman Empire passed 133 anti-Gypsy measures in the years 1551–1774; in 1571 Frankfurt am Main passed a decree legalizing the killing of Gypsies, making it explicit that the killer would go unpunished; and as in much of the rest of Europe, persecution, torture, transportation or life in the galleys. And yet, despite the number of remaining records across Germany, for example, ‘only one instance of the execution of a Gypsy has come to light’ within the first 300 years of their arrival, ‘a remarkable circumstance in any country’.1

  It is timely then to consider exactly what enacting legislation meant in the early modern world, and how the state was able, or not, to put it into effect. Even in France and Britain, which by the end of the seventeenth century probably had the highest capacity for implementing the wishes of the central state on the ground, if they had even come close to achieving the aim of removing Gypsies from their societies, ‘by the middle of the seventeenth century there would hardly have remained . . . a footloose Gypsy against whom to legislate’.2 Consequently right across western Europe at this time we can see something of the tension between the expanding ambitions of early modern states, and their material limitations. Looking for an explanation for the mismatch between intention and action we can point to two main factors: the limitations of state power, and the resilience of Gypsy culture in the face of oppression. Indeed due to a lack of coordinated effort and sustained implementation it is important to remember that ‘laws in general are a poor guide to the treatment of Gypsies’.3 This is not to argue that Gypsies were not persecuted: those forced into the galleys of France or Spain’s squadrons; those branded, flogged and exiled right across Europe all experienced these things because they were Gypsies. What we need to be alive to, however, is how the difficulties experienced by the early modern state in translating its theoretical authority into actual exercise of power effectively meant there was a space in which Gypsies could carve out a place for themselves in European society.

  Consequently we can see the importance of understanding the limits of the technologies of rule available to states in the early modern period. While a monarch might have believed him- or herself, and been believed, to hold absolute power, in reality they were entirely reliant on actors at the local level for their wishes to be put into effect. Here we come across a phenomenon that we will see played out time and again: the ‘state’ was and is in fact a patchwork of different organizations and actors, often with competing interests and different priorities, and often demonstrating a ‘reluctance, resistance or simple inability to comply’. When we overlay these with ‘wrangles over jurisdictional competence, endemic corruption and interminable appeals procedures’ the wonder is often how any law was ever translated into action on the ground.4

  Therefore, as we move into the seventeenth century and view the swathe of legislation passed against Gypsies right across Europe we need to understand not only the intentions of those in power, but what impact it had on the ground. It has been suggested that the Spanish edict of 1619 should be viewed as ‘gesture of frustration’ in the face of the knowledge that previous anti-Gypsy legislation had never been enforced. The key innovation of this new law was that, through banning the use of the word ‘gitano’, it aimed to officially erase Gypsy ethnicity simply by denying its existence. But in 1633 yet another sanction was passed, on effectively the same lines, declaring that Gypsy dress, language, separate barrios or meetings were banned, on the grounds that ‘those who call themselves Gitanos are not by origin or by nature but have adopted this form of life for such deleterious purposes as are now experienced’. Again, the use of the word ‘gitano’ was prohibited, and they were not to be portrayed in dances or performances. Anyone identified as a wandering Gypsy could be taken as a slave, and groups of Gypsies were permitted to be hunted. Given the problems of depopulation across Spain full-scale banishment was no longer seen as an appropriate sanction; while women could be sentenced to flogging and banishment, men were put to the galleys for six years. And yet if these measures were implemented, they were certainly done so patchily, both across time and place, for by 1695 further legislation was felt necessary. This ordered a census of all Gypsies, to include their occupations, weapons and livestock. Once again they were ordered not to live in separate barrios, but only in settlements of over 200 inhabitants and to work only in agriculture. They were banned from keeping or using horses or weapons, and from attending fairs and markets.5 The picture then for Gypsies in Spain at the end of the seventeenth century, despite nearly a century of being denied an existence, was in fact one where they lived in separate districts, pursued a range of occupations including horse trading at fairs and markets, and lived in settlements both large and small.6

  Perhaps the issue was that the Spanish state was simply too big and poorly served by administrators to be able to enforce its will effectively? What happens if we turn to the other end of the scale and consider the possibilities for close attention afforded by a small state, such as was found in the German territories in this period? Far from being a centralized state, this area consisted of around 300 sovereign powers, all of whom could pass special legislation for their own territory. These were overlain by the Holy Roman Empire, which in theory was united under an emperor elected by seven leading princes, but in practice existed as a patchwork of free cities, principalities and bishoprics. Consistent across German legislation against Gypsies in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a clause complaining that previous legislation had not been enforced. In-depth study of surviving records suggests that

  Not only do the authorities appear not to have gone out of their way to arrest and execute Gypsies, but when they had arrested them for, or on suspicion of some crime, in no case do they put the extreme law into execution: they simply pass them on, with or without a whipping.7

  Proximity to other states not only presented the opportunity to move the ‘problem’ on, it could also undermine attempts at prosecution, something we can see if we look at the use of false passports by Gypsies in 1579 within the principality of Stolberg in the Rhineland:

  Some Gypsies, under pretext of possessing imperial safe-conducts, entered his county, swindled the inhabitants out of several hundred florins and escaped into the jurisdiction of the Lord of Hartenberg who was a vassal of the Principality of Mainz. The Count pursued and arrested the fugitives, but the Lord of Hartenberg, fearing the passports, although they were evidently clumsy counterfeits, would do nothing.

  This led the Count of Stolberg to pass an edict making the exhibition of all passports compulsory.8 For us it reveals not only the longevity of the use of safe-conduct letters, a good century and a half after their first use, but the fractured nature of state action. In this period when borders and boundaries were becoming more important – indeed Boes has observed
that the German word for border, Grenze, did not come into common usage before the sixteenth century – as well as serving to keep out undesirables, they could also act to the advantage of those fleeing the law, particularly somewhere like the Holy Roman Empire, which seemed constitutionally incapable of acting coherently. This not only made a large number of laws necessary, but crucially it made them less effective, and throughout the seventeenth century Gypsies often resorted to borderlands as one way of surviving in a hostile world.

  In France, it was not until the second half of the seventeenth century that legislation against Gypsies became properly active. Before this, the lack of clarity of the legislation, combined with the chaos of the Wars of Religion (1562–98) meant that any repression towards Gypsies was geographically patchy and rarely sustained. The wars had also produced decades of unrest fuelled in part by well-armed groups of (ex-)soldiers roaming the countryside. The eventual emergence of a newly centralized French state from this civil war saw the monarchy and state becoming more powerful, and part of this process was the strengthening of its army, and an attempt to stamp out the legacy of lawlessness.9 Key to this project was Cardinal Richelieu’s centrally appointed ‘intendants’, who acted as the king’s agent in the provinces. This development was coupled with an advance in education and Catholic religious socialization, which were part of a wider project to produce the ideal of a well-ordered society. Within this new vision the vagrant and the wanderer had no place, and indeed was perceived by the state as a threat, in both deed and example. Fixed, regular work was seen as the dividing line between those accepted and those rejected. As was so often the case these images and a desire for social control existed in tension with France’s, and indeed Europe’s, need for a migrant workforce and the reality of migration in the early modern world. While it was their nomadic behaviour and apparent idleness that saw Gypsies classed as undesirables, in fact at the local level they were often accepted, and even welcomed within communities for the services they provided.10

  The most important development as far as Gypsies, or Bohemians as they increasingly became known in France, were concerned was the setting up of Europe’s first fully centralized police force, the maréchaussée (marshalry) in 1687. A major part of their work was to follow up on sightings of vagrants and Bohemians and to enforce the terms of an edict of 1682. This law was directed at ‘all those who are called Bohèmes or Egyptians’, and decreed that all adult men were to be sent to the galleys, boys to houses of correction, while women and girls were to have their heads shaved, and if they persisted in their ways, were to be flogged and banished. In order to encourage enforcement, rewards were given to the maréchaussée for each individual captured, whether vagabond, Bohemian, heathen or otherwise, and right up to the Revolution there are accounts of armed rural police hunting down Gypsies. However, while this was a major innovation, the numbers of marshals was relatively small. Even after reform in the 1760s, there were only 3,882 police in all of provincial France, a country of 25 million people.

  While the edict was enforced across France, often the effect was the breaking up of the large majority of the companies numbering up to 200 members. They dispersed into smaller, less conspicuous groups who found it easier to move on before they were apprehended, and in addition many seem to have moved into difficult to access and only recently integrated border regions such as Alsace-Lorraine and the Basque areas of the Pyrenees. In some mountainous areas, such as Alsace-Lorraine, large bands managed to continue for some time longer. Here wild game was plentiful and the area was sufficiently lightly governed for groups to be able to launch heavily armed raids on local villages for supplies and to cross the border in times of danger. Some bands gained much notoriety, such as that of Hannikel Reinhardt, which stole pigs, sheep and poultry, and also robbed Jews and ecclesiasticals. They were reportedly so confident of their position that they would march through villages at night with lighted torches, intimidating residents with quasi-military behaviour.11 However, recent research has questioned the extent to which this strong association between Gypsies and forest regions is backed up by documentary evidence. Rather than being based on multiple reports, it seems that the maréchaussée in fact found few Gypsies in the forests, and the French association between forests and Gypsies came as much from assumptions of their animal and anti-civilizational qualities as from reality.12 Equally we need to be wary of assuming that the 1682 declaration, with its insistence that Gypsies should be condemned ‘without any form of figure of legal process’ was implemented any more consistently over time than it was across place. Evidence rather suggests that after a brief period of intense implementation, many judges rapidly returned to treating Gypsies like any other citizen.13 So overall while it appears that large groups of Gypsies were commonly broken up and geographically dispersed at this time, overall any impact was patchy and inconsistent.

  Consequently, it is important that we understand how laws often existed more as a threat than an action, and rather served to keep Gypsies on the margins of society than to remove them completely. And by existing on the margins of society it was possible for them to live a life often ignored by the authorities, except at times when they were seen as too much of an irritant, or too potentially useful to be ignored by the state. This becomes clear if we look at the evolving ways in which the early modern state dealt with lawlessness and criminality. As states expanded their ambitions, both in terms of what a state was seen to be for and the level of control they desired over their population, ideas of punishment changed.

  In part this was manifested through the realization that rather than removing undesirable elements through banishment, states could use the labour power of prisoners for its own ends. In some places, such as Spain, to this was added the extra incentive of depopulation, which made the traditional responses of expulsion or execution far less logical punishments than sentencing criminals to labour. And so we see a trend of criminals being deployed in the galleys as rowers, and in mercury and other mines where it was hard to recruit free labourers. Galleys had become an established feature of anti-Gypsy edicts in Spain and France by the mid-sixteenth century. This phenomenon can be seen as part of a wider trend of the treatment of criminal elements, rather than as something specific to Gypsies themselves. So, as early as 1564 Charles IX of France forbade the sentencing of prisoners to the galleys for fewer than ten years, while a century later Louis XIV, in order to fulfil his expansionist ambitions, ordered that the courts should sentence men to the galleys as often as possible, even in times of peace.14 Spain’s desire to protect its coasts and its shipping led to the maintenance of a standing galley fleet in the Mediterranean, while both Venice and Genoa also required labour to fulfil their imperial and trading aims.

  The seventeenth century saw galleys growing larger in order to accommodate more fighting men and cannon, with the rowing forces expanding proportionally. In 1587 the standard Spanish galley needed 170 rowers; by 1621 this had increased to 260.15 The second half of the seventeenth century saw an absolute and relative increase in the number of men under arms, both soldiers and rowers in the galleys. This was not simply the result of the warmongering of Louis XIV between 1672 and 1714, but the product of German princes attempting to consolidate their power and maintain fighting forces. The increased demand for soldiers led to pressures on recruitment, with agents then turning to vagrants and the poor to fill the gap, and it is no surprise therefore that while women and children still faced flogging and banishment, action against adult male criminals, as much as specifically anti-Gypsy legislation, saw them sentenced to the galleys.16

  We can tie this development in with the practice of ‘Gypsy hunts’ (heidenjachten) that were a feature of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europe. In Germany the centre of the hunts was in the south, reaching from Thüringen and Saxony through Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden to the Palatine while also reaching into the French Lorraine region. It is true that this part of Europe, which was politically fragmented and
consisted of inaccessible terrain, was attractive to Gypsies, providing as it did plenty of borders to cross and hiding places in which to avoid the authorities. However, recent research has tied the location of these hunts very specifically to their role in providing labour for the armies and galleys of Europe. After 1675 several German states began to conscript their ‘unwanted’ as soldiers, while Prussia, Bradenburg and Saxony ordered their sub-districts to round up vagrants in order to supply their recruits.17 At the same time, but in the south of Europe, the demand from Genoa, Venice and the French Mediterranean was more for galley rowers than soldiers in order to sustain the naval conflict with the Ottoman Empire. While some of this labour was supplied through the prisons of some German states – notably Bavaria, Württemburg and Baden – a large number came from round-ups of vagrants in certain parts of Germany. Given this context the ‘outlaw corridor’ between the Palatine and Saxony becomes explicable: this was an area far enough from both the Prussian-Bradenburg recruitment district, and owing to the expense of transportation in relation to the amount fetched by a slave, too far from the Mediterranean. Consequently this became an area attractive to vagrants, Gypsies and others avoiding conscription. The states in this corridor hosted higher numbers of vagrants, some of whom banded together in large groups in order to further defend themselves, and in order to pillage more effectively. States responded with ever more severe measures outlawing vagrants, and Gypsies, the end result of which were the ‘Gypsy hunts’.18

  Not all the European states had the option of transportation, or even the capacity to translate law into action. It was no coincidence that it was the emerging nations of Britain, France, Spain and Portugal, with their developing national governments and increasing capacity to impose central will on their peripheries, which expanded their empires in this period. But what of other European nations, many of which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were overrun by war and religious conflict? It is hard to underestimate how the political and religious chaos of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries very directly tied into the treatment of Gypsies. This was indeed a time when, try as they might, states did not have the monopoly on violence – they may have had increasing ambitions to hold absolute power over their subjects, but in practice this was often limited and contested.