The Gypsies of Early Modern Spain, 1425-1783 the Gypsies of Early Modern Spain, 1425-1783
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The Gypsies of Early Modern Spain, 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, New York, 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 European Union 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-History. 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 Europe 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 War, 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 Inquisition 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 Aragon, 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 society 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 will 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.