nhabitants were more gullible, and the soft parts of
their nature were easily getatable, and the consequence was the Gipsies
made a good thing of it for the space of four years. Soon after leaving
Zurich, according to Dr. Mikliosch, the wanderers divided their forces.
One detachment crossed the Botzberg and created quite a panic amongst the
peaceable inhabitants of Sisteron, who, fearing and imagining all sorts
of evils from these satanic-looking people, fed them with a hundred
loaves, and induced them, for the good of their health, to make
themselves miserably less. We next hear of them in Italy, in 1422.
After leaving Asiatic Turkey, and in their wanderings through Russia and
Germany, the Asiatic, sanctimonious, religious halo, borrowed from their
idolatrous form and notions of the worship of God in the East, had
suffered much from exposure to the civilising and Christianising
influences of the West; and the result was their leaders decided to make
a pilgrimage to Rome to regain, under the cloak of religion, some of the
self-imagined lost prestige; and in this they were, at any rate, for a
time, successful. On the 11th day of July, 1422, a leader of the
Gipsies, named Duke Andrew, arrived at Bologna, with men, women and
children, fully one hundred persons, carrying with them, as they alleged,
a decree signed by the King of Hungary, permitting them, owing to their
return to the Christian faith--stating at the same time that 4,000 had
been re-baptised--to rob without penalty or hindrance wherever they
travelled during seven years. Here these long-faced, pious hypocrites
were in clover, as a reward for their professed re-embracing
Christianity. After the expiration of this term they told the
open-mouthed inhabitants, as a kind of sweetener, that they were to
present themselves to the Pope, and then return to India--aye, with the
spoils of their lying campaign, gained by robbing and plundering all they
came in contact with. The result of their deceitful, lying expedition to
Rome was all they could wish, and they received a fresh passport from .
the Pope, asking for alms from his faithful flock on behalf of these
wretches, who have been figuring before western nations of the
world--sometimes as kings, counts, martyrs, prophets, witches, thieves,
liars, and murderers; sometimes laying their misfortunes at the door of
the King of Egypt, the Sultan of Turkey, religious persecution in India,
the King of Hungary, and a thou