FREDERICK 8. ARNOLD. 89 



toms. And more than that, language and race have left 

 traces till to-day in India, Persia, Syria and Egypt, and 

 the mysterious language I talked in the midway can be 

 traced all the way back fo that idol of the philologist the 

 Sanskrit, while the races from which the Gypsies sprang 

 are to be found amongst the semi-wandering tribes of 

 Northern India. 



The first appearance of the Gypsies in Europe is gen- 

 erally placed at about 1417. They came in with the 

 renaissance and the Hussite war and the end of the great 

 Schism, but there is no reason to believe that they 

 bothered themselves much about these great questions 

 which vpere troubling all western Christendom. They 

 entered Europe probably through Transylvania and 

 Hungary, whither they had come up the Danube from 

 Greece and Turkey. Their first known settlement was 

 in Moldavia near Szuesava, where about three thousand 

 of them appeared in 1417 and got permission to remain 

 from Alexander, Vojvode of the district. Other bands 

 made their way into Hungary and in 1423 got writs or 

 privileges from the Emperor Sigismund, permitting them 

 to settle near the free cities and on the crown estates. 

 (Borrow, ''Zincali," Introduction, p. 10.) 



They soon passed into Bohemia and Germany and be- 

 cause their descent on the west of Europe was largely 

 from Bohemia, they were known to the French and in 

 literature as Bohemians. They spread in a short time 

 over all the continent, "In 1418 they were found in 

 "Switzerland ; in 1422, in Italy ; in 1427, they are men- 

 "tioned as being in the neighborhood of Paris; and 

 "about the same time in Spain." (Simpson, "History 

 of the Gypsies," Chap, I, p. 69.) 



From the very first they seem to have been the same 

 wild, uncanny, nomadic race, but their leaders, at the 

 time of their arrival, muse have been men of more than 

 the average ability, for, by a diplomatic fiction carefully 



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