About us — the Roma

Since the early 2000s, population-genetics research has provided independent confirmation of the Roma’s South Asian origin, and has added considerable precision to the timing of the migration. Genome-wide studies of Roma communities across Europe indicate that today’s Roma descend from a single founder population that originated in north-western India roughly 1,400 to 1,500 years ago.

These studies also show that the migration involved a severe founder effect: a relatively small group left the Indian subcontinent, moved with limited additional genetic mixing through the Near or Middle East, and only began to intermix substantially with local European populations after reaching the Balkans and other host regions, mostly during the period between roughly 1270 and 1580.

Genetic and linguistic evidence therefore reinforce each other: both point to a single, relatively small population that left the Indian subcontinent at some point in the second half of the first millennium CE, travelled largely intact as a group for centuries, and only diversified genetically and linguistically once its descendants had spread across different regions of Europe.

The exact reasons the ancestors of the Roma left India are not recorded and remain a matter of scholarly debate; proposed explanations range from displacement connected to warfare and invasions in northern India to the movement of specialised craft, entertainment or military-service groups. What can be reconstructed more confidently is the route: after leaving the Indian subcontinent, the migrating groups passed through the Persian-speaking world, where Romani absorbed a lasting layer of Persian vocabulary, and later through Armenia, where a smaller but still identifiable layer of Armenian loanwords entered the language.

Some historians have connected early Persian and Arabic references to itinerant groups known as “Zott” or “Luri” — reportedly deported from India towards the Middle East in the early medieval period — to the ancestors of the Roma, although this identification is not universally accepted and the surviving sources are fragmentary.

By the ninth century, groups ancestral to the Roma are generally thought to have reached the Byzantine Empire, and by the eleventh century they were established within its territory, including in Byzantine Asia Minor and, not long after, in the Byzantine Balkans. One of the earliest concrete references comes from an eleventh-century Georgian text, the Life of Saint George the Athonite, which describes a group called the “Adsincani” being asked by the Byzantine emperor to help clear dangerous wild animals from an imperial hunting ground on Mount Athos.

This Byzantine-Greek name, Atsinganoi (Ἀτσίγγανοι) — itself apparently borrowed from the name of an earlier, unrelated heretical sect with which the newcomers were confused — is the direct linguistic ancestor of most of the names later used for the Roma across Europe: Zigeuner in German, tsiganes in French, cigán and cigány in Central Europe, and zíngaro in Italian. The English word “Gypsy” instead reflects a different, later misunderstanding: it derives from “Egyptian”, because some groups arriving in Western Europe in the 15th century claimed, or were believed, to have come from Egypt.

From Byzantine Asia Minor and the Byzantine Balkans, Roma communities gradually spread further into south-eastern Europe over the following two to three centuries, well before the more thoroughly documented mass arrivals in Central and Western Europe in the early 15th century.

The territories that are now Romania — the medieval principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia — are where Roma communities are first documented as a settled, substantial population in Europe, from the second half of the 14th century onward. The earliest known reference is a 1385 Wallachian document recording a gift of enslaved Roma (“atsigani”) to a monastery, which shows that by that date Roma were already present in the region in significant numbers and already, in that particular case, being treated as property — the starting point of the five-century history of Roma slavery documented separately.

Historians disagree on exactly why Roma slavery began specifically in Wallachia and Moldavia rather than elsewhere in Europe; explanations that have been proposed include the value of Roma craft skills — metalworking, and later also enslaved captives brought back from campaigns against the Tatars and the Ottomans — in frontier principalities with a chronic shortage of skilled labour and a weak free peasantry able to resist such treatment.

The best-documented phase of the westward migration is the arrival of organised Roma groups in Central and Western Europe in the early 15th century. Between 1417 and about 1435, chronicles and municipal records across the Holy Roman Empire — from Hesse and Saxony to Switzerland and the Baltic coast — describe the sudden appearance of groups of a few hundred people, travelling under leaders who used titles such as “duke” or “count” and who presented themselves as Christian pilgrims performing a penance imposed on them, supposedly for having abandoned their faith, in a land they called “Little Egypt”.

These leaders carried letters of safe conduct, including documents that they claimed had been issued by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, which they showed to local authorities to secure free passage, provisions and, at least initially, a cautiously hospitable reception. This pilgrimage narrative — whatever its factual basis — appears to have been a deliberate and largely successful strategy for entering unfamiliar territories peacefully during the first years of the migration.

The welcome did not last. Within a generation, chroniclers’ descriptions shifted from curiosity to suspicion, and by the mid-to-late 15th century the same groups that had once been received with alms and safe conducts were increasingly accused of begging, fortune-telling and theft, and were being expelled from many of the same territories — laying the groundwork for the much harsher legislation of the following century.

From Central Europe, Roma groups continued moving west and south over the following decades. France records early arrivals from around 1419, and the first documented arrival on the Iberian Peninsula dates to 12 January 1425, when King Alfonso V of Aragon granted a leader referred to as “Count Don Juan of Little Egypt” safe conduct for himself and his group to travel through the kingdom on a professed pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.

Within a few decades, Roma communities were present in most parts of Western Europe, including the British Isles by the early 16th century. As in Central Europe, initial curiosity and formal hospitality gave way within a generation or two to suspicion, restrictive legislation and, in many territories, the campaigns of expulsion and persecution documented in the companion history of Roma persecution in Europe.