f a fine of
fifty livres. Besides this, by a strange application of the laws of
retaliation, those who had been robbed by these foreigners were permitted
to rob them to the extent of the value of the things stolen. In
consequence of this, the Bolognians entered a stable in which several of
the Egyptians' horses were kept, and took out one of the finest of them.
In order to recover him the Egyptians agreed to restore what they had
taken, and the restitution was made. But perceiving that they could no
longer do any good for themselves in this province, they struck their
tents and started for Rome, to which city they said they were bound to go,
not only in order to accomplish a pilgrimage imposed upon them by the
Sultan, who had expelled them from their own land, but especially to
obtain letters of absolution from the Holy Father.

[Illustration: Fig. 370.--Gipsies Fortune-telling.--Fac-simile of a
Woodcut in the "Cosmographie Universelle" of Munster: in folio, Basle,
1552.]

In 1422 the band left Italy, and we find them at Basle and in Suabia.
Then, besides the imperial passports, of which they had up to that time
alone boasted, they pretended to have in their possession bulls which they
stated that they had obtained from the Pope. They also modified their
original tale, and stated that they were descendants of the Egyptians who
refused hospitality to the Holy Virgin and to St. Joseph during their
flight into Egypt: they also declared that, in consequence of this crime,
God had doomed their race to perpetual misery and exile.

Five years later we find them in the neighbourhood of Paris. "The Sunday
after the middle of August," says "The Journal of a Bourgeois of Paris,"
"there came to Paris twelve so-called pilgrims, that is to say, a duke, a
count, and ten men, all on horseback; they said that they were very good
Christians, and that they came from Lower Egypt; ... and on the 29th of
August, the anniversary of the beheading of St. John, the rest of the band
made their appearance. These, however, were not allowed to enter Paris,
but, by order of the provost, were lodged in the Chapel of St. Denis. They
did not number more than one hundred and twenty, including women and
children. They stated that, when they left their own country, they
numbered from a thousand to twelve hundred, but that the rest had died on
the road..... Whilst they were at the chapel never was such a concourse of
people collected, even at the blessing