The Gypsies of Early Modern , 1425-1783 The Gypsies of Early Modern Spain, 1425-1783

Richard J. Pym © Richard j . Pym 2007 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-9231-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the * Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, , N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LlC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-54346-5 ISBN 978-0-230-62532-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230625327

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pym, Richard. The gypsises of early modern Spain, 1425-1783/Richard j. Pym. p. em . Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Romanies-Spain-. 2. Spain-Ethnic relations-History. I. Title.

DX2S1 .P96 2007 305.891' 4970460903-dc22 2006051019 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07

Tran ferred to I igital Prin ti ng 20 I I For Annie, Alex and Charlotte Contents

Acknowledgements ix Introduction x

1 The Early Years 1 Newcomers in western 3 Into Iberia 4 Of convivencia and conflict 10 2 Under One God 20 Changing the rules: royal authority, law and order, and faith 20 The Catholic Monarchs' 1499 ordinance and its reiterations 24 Vagabondage and the gypsies 28 3 The Road to the Sea 35 Exclusion 35 Philip II and the manning of Spain's galleys 41 4 Years of Crisis 51 , famine, and pestilence in late sixteenth-century Castile 51 The moriscos and the gypsies 55 5 Representations 65 The 1619 consulta, the arbitristas, and the gypsies 65 The gypsies in Spanish literature 77 6 Purging the Body Politic 86 The royal ordinances of 1619 and 1633 86 Sedentarization and strategies for survival 92 Philip IV and the manning of Spain's galleys 100 7 The Spanish Church and the Gypsies 105 106 Sanctuary 118 8 The Failure of the Laws and the Last Habsburg 128 The failures of anti-gypsy legislation 128 Tightening the noose: the late seventeenth century 139

vii viii Contents

9 The Bourbon Period 143 Forging a modern state 143 Crackdown 152 'Enlightened despotism': towards reform 157 Conclusion 164

Notes 167

Bibliography 199 Index 210 Acknowledgements

I owe a considerable debt to the pioneering archival work on Spain's gypsies carried out by Bernard Leblon, Antonio Gomez Alfaro, and Maria Helena Sanchez Ortega, especially in relation to the eighteenth century, and additionally in the case of Maria Helena Sanchez Ortega, the Inquis­ ition. Others whose work has been of fundamental importance for my own include Teresa de San Roman and Amada Lopez de Meneses, as well as Sir Angus Fraser, whose writings on gypsies, while by no means limited to Spain, provided a wealth of valuable information, especially about the late medieval period. More recently, a study by Lou Charnon­ Deutsch, although concerned primarily with the nineteenth and twen­ tieth centuries, has done much to help extend our understanding of how the culturally iconic figure of the Spanish gypsy has been constructed and represented by Spaniards and non-Spaniards alike. I should also like to express my thanks to ]aume Riera, Head of Refer­ encing at the Archivo de la Corona de , Jose Maria Burriaza at the Archivo General de Simancas, and other archive staff too numerous to mention individually there and at the Archivo Historico Nacional in Madrid and Toledo for their professionalism, generosity, and patient encouragement. I am grateful, too, to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the generous research leave award that enabled me to complete the book. Special thanks are due to Alistair Malcolm of the University of Limerick's Department of History, who read the entire manuscript with the eye of a lynx, making many useful suggestions. Finally, I would like to express my profound gratitude to Melveena McKendrick of Cambridge University for her unfailing support, wise counsel, and remarkable gener­ osity of spirit. Some of the material in Chapters 2, 6, and 8 originally appeared in Rhetoric and Reality in Early Modem Spain, ed. Richard]. Pym (Wood­ bridge: Tamesis, 2006) and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher. All translations are the author's unless otherwise indicated in the endnotes. Where early modern sources are cited, the original spelling has been preserved in titles, though modern accentuation has been added here and there for the sake of clarity.

ix Introduction

A great deal has been written about Spain's jewish and Muslim (or converted morisco) minorities in the early modern period. Its gypsies or gitanos, however, have been largely ignored by scholars of the period. Very few historians of early modern Spain, with the distinguished excep­ tions of Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, Henry Kamen, and the special­ ists mentioned in the preface, even accord them the briefest mention, preoccupied for the most part with centrist or more generally European or imperial concerns. Certainly, no full-length study in English of the early history of Spain's gypsies has ever been written. Yet there is much to be learned from such a study, not just about the fortunes of the gypsies themselves, but also about the larger through which they moved. The purpose of this book is therefore to reconstruct the first three and a half centuries in Spain- the opening chapter covers the late medieval period when the gypsies first arrived there - of a people who have until now remained largely invisible to history in the English-speaking world. It focus in particular on the late sixteenth century and the first four decades of the seventeenth, a crucial period of crisis for Spain and its minority morisco and gypsy populations alike. Such a project is not, however, without its difficulties. Before the work of Leblon, Sanchez Ortega, Gomez Alfaro, and Lopez de Meneses began to appear, the little that had previously been written about Spain's gypsies had tended far too easily to buy into myth, uncritically re-cycling received wisdom, and lacking a solid evidential base. In the nineteenth century a much romanticized version of the figure of the Spanish gypsy even became for many non-Spaniards a virtual synonym for Spain itself. When Lou Charnon-Deutsch noted that her recent study was not about 'the real Romany', she was acknowledging precisely this fictive yet undeniably influential aspect of so many representations of 'the idealized and some­ times demonized figure of the Spanish Gypsy, conceived throughout hundreds of years as a foreign and exotic presence who stealthfully imported something of the East into the West'.1 Behind such romanticizing or demonizing distortions, which can be traced back at least to Cervantes's day, the gypsies themselves, history's real gypsies, inevitably remain somewhat elusive. Many social groups in history have been voiceless. The gypsies are not alone in that. But when to the profundity of that silence is added their always marginal and, for

X Introduction xi

most of the period, unregistered status, the fact that, entirely illiterate, they left no written records, no works of art, no literature, no recover­ able oral tradition, and that they had no distinctive religious liturgy or representative institutions of their own, then the task of writing about them is inevitably daunting. As to quantitative data, one should make it clear from the outset that these are virtually non-existent before the late eighteenth century. Even then, the census figures of 1783, for example, should not be regarded as particularly reliable in that they are unlikely to be comprehensive. That said, the eighteenth century is very much better documented than earlier periods, though there is almost certainly much early evidence still to be discovered in local or family archives, especially in southern Spain, where the greatest gypsy concentrations were (and still are) to be found and where they enjoyed some powerful protectors. If, then, as is sometimes claimed, written history is a jigsaw with some of the pieces missing, this one will inevitably lack more than most. But that does not mean that there is nothing useful to be said. Whilst our means of access to early modern Spain's gypsies are almost always indirect, except, perhaps, for the occasional defensive or dissembling voice meticulously reproduced in the records of the Inquisition, there remains nevertheless sufficient documentary evidence to allow much of this significant minority's early history to be reconstructed. Where that evidence is incomplete or allows only for conjecture, I have tried always to make this clear, and can only add that the reader's inevitable frustration at such moments is shared, acutely, by the author. In one sense, then, this book also represents a plea for further archival research. Many questions remain to be answered: there is, for example, the rela­ tionship between gypsies and moriscos during and after the expulsions of the latter in the early seventeenth century; or the little researched dynamics of interracial relations in the early modern period in areas like the campiiia south-east of Seville and around Jerez de la Frontera; or, indeed, the true extent and nature of the protection against the civil authorities for so long extended to gypsies by the Church, the , and ordinary Spaniards. Even the gypsies' remote past remains shrouded to a degree in contro­ versy, though today's consensus view, supported by linguistic analyses which have identified Sanskrit traces in the many different dialects of Romani, points to an origin in the . From there, it is generally believed that the gypsies departed en masse, for unknown, in the tenth century, moving slowly westwards before even­ tually arriving in early in the fourteenth. The gypsies in question are Roma, cales (dark-skinned) as Spanish gypsies call xii Introduction themselves. They are the subject of this study. Groups who found their way into Spain in later periods and who are nowadays usually considered gitanos, like the Portuguese cinganos, many of whom are probably not in fact of gypsy origin, and the hungaros, who are few in number, have no place in this narrative. Nor do the so-called quinquis, a shortened form of quincalleros (tinkers), another, almost certainly non-gypsy group, itinerant until the mid-twentieth century and possibly descended from driven off the land and onto Spain's roads by hunger and disease in the late sixteenth century.2 Just as there exist significant differences related to economic status, sedentarization, and regional origin among Spanish gypsies of today,3 so too it would be a mistake to think of the gypsies of early modern Spain as an entirely homogenous group. As we shall see, the authorities' conception of who or what a gypsy was tended anyway to evolve, and for most of the early modern period was determined much more by beha­ vioural criteria than any narrowly construed notion of genetic descent. Such a notion would anyway have been of strictly limited utility, given the degree of that had undoubtedly occurred down the centuries, gitano endogamy, then as now, being practised much more strictly in some patrigroups than in others. How, then, should we think of the term gitano? Max Weber wrote that ethnic groups are 'those groups that entertain a subjective belief in their because of similarities of physical type or of customs or of both, or because of memories of colonization or migration'.4 More specifically, the social anthropologist Teresa de San Roman has proposed five constituent features around which today's gitanos' sense of cultural or ethnic identity may usefully be considered to coalesce. First, in cal6 Spanish gypsies share at least the vestigial remnants of their own common language. Second, they share in Weberian terms a shared, disaffiliative and contradistinctive sense of ethnic identity vis-a-vis non-gypsy or payo society. This is based on language, the markedly patriarchal extended family or raza, respect for clan elders, often referred to nowadays as tfos (uncles), a profound reverence for the dead, the importance of virginity and fidelity in gypsy women, pollu­ tion taboos associated with the female lower body, especially in respect of menstruation, respect for the territorial claims of other patrigroups, and the conspicuously lavish and colourful celebration of weddings and . Third, their relationship with the authorities continues on the whole to be one characterized by conflict and distrust, and, one should add, a shared, if historically indistinct cultural memory of repres­ sion. Fourth, they have developed cultural strategies based primarily Introduction xiii on a ready mobility designed to maximize access to scarce resources. And fifth, they benefit from an extremely flexible socio-spatial organiza­ tion, frequently using endogamous to cement alliances which enhance that flexibility. 5 As suggested, I shall also argue that a study of this nature can provide useful insights into the attitudes and practices of important sections of early modern Spanish society, especially in rural areas. These relate not just to the often complex relationship between Spaniards of every estate and the gypsies, but also to the intractable problems encountered by the crown in its attempts, frustrated time and again, to impose its will via legislation on recalcitrant nobles, churchmen, and ordinary Spaniards alike. Such questions, related as they are to the continuing co-existence or convivencia in early modern Spain of different ethnic groups, also connect with a larger historical debate. Notwithstanding L. P. Hartley's much-quoted maxim, the past, at least as far as Spanish is concerned, seems less another country where they do things differently than a battleground on which competing, and often radically different versions of nation and national identity, of 'Spanishness', are anxiously locked in struggle. I refer here not so much to the fact that for most of the early modern period 'Spain' was not a unitary state in any mean­ ingful sense of the term, but rather to the way historians have long tended to propose very different versions of how this society or should be interpreted. One has only to think of the sharply antagonistic response of some Spanish historians to Henry Kamen's recent assertion that the creation of the Spanish was not in fact the exclusive preserve of Spaniards, but rather a distinctly collaborative enterprise involving many nations and peoples, including those subjected.6 Such conflicting claims are not new, and can be traced back through much of Spanish history. Perhaps, though, their best-known modern manifesta­ tion is to be found in exchanges in the last century involving America Castro and Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz, discussed at greater length in my opening chapter. Elsewhere, partly with the general reader in mind, I have devoted some more general discussion to particular historical contexts, like the early reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the crisis years of the early seventeenth century, or the changed political landscape of eighteenth century, Bourbon Spain, wherever, in fact, I felt this might throw a particular light on the situation of Spain's gypsies or where significant developments had specific, lasting implications for them. Finally, one should perhaps explain very briefly why this book has nothing at all to say on the subject of flamenco, an art of course closely associated with Spanish gypsies, who remain among its most adept xiv Introduction interpreters. The is simple. The very first reference to anything that can with a reasonable degree of confidence be identified as an ancestor of today's flamenco occurs only late in the eighteenth century in Jose Cadalso's Cartas marruecas, written in 1773-4. In this work the author, an army officer, describes gypsy women dancing in the country house of a young Andalusian nobleman with whom their leader, one 'tio Gregorio', quaffing jugs of wine, distributing lit cigars, and altern­ ately cursing and clapping out the rhythms, appears to be on altogether terms.7