We have thus not aimed to give an account of Gypsy slavery as an institution, which is a vast subject per se. Some researchers consider that this taboo might be due to the incompatibility between the image of slavery and the national heroes (Piasere, 2016).
Although Marxists questioned what binds oppression with a determinate regime of production, and while some of the favoured subjects for research were about economic agrarian relations, Gypsy slavery was not recognised in Romanian historiography during the second half of the twentieth century. There is however a historiography of Roma slavery since the time of Emancipation, and “national” schools of slavery research existed by mainly engaging in narratives of Gypsy enslavement as an institution presented as worse in others than in Romania.
It is almost unanimously accepted by researchers and activists that Roma slavery is not sufficiently studied 4. The duration of Gypsy slavery is estimated from the first document mentioning the term Țigan, 1385, until the last official Emancipation in the 1850s. The Gypsies could be attached to ecclesiastical institutions, Orthodox and Catholic 3 ( țigani mănăstirești) or belong to private owners ( țigani boierești), mostly from old aristocratic families, and a few numbers of them belonged to the Crown or the state ( țigani domnești, țigani ai statului).
The appearance of migrants of Indian origin in Romanian Principalities added to extant social stratification. 2 The course of life and the socio-economic contexts generated by the successive territorial occupations of migratory people, have determined the social stratifications and the forms of survival of communities (Stahl, H.H. The co-existence of free peasants ( moșneni, moșteni) and dependent peasants ( rumâni, vecini) is ancient, most likely from the period of ethnological survival followed by the withdrawal of the Roman army cum administration from the northern Danube region. There were many restrictions on social freedom in Romanian Principalities, ranging from serfdom and slavery 1 to subservient peasantry ( rumânia), to Țigani as rob slaves. Robia (Gypsy slavery) may represent such a local synthesis which is unlike the sin-induced slavery described in the Bible, and different from the Roman slavery of the Principalities’ past.
Geopolitically, the Danubian Principalities are an intersection of Christian and Muslim civilisations, the Catholic West and Orthodox Byzantium, a space for synthesis of several political, economic, and social institutions taken over or transposed.
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