Anyone reviewing the lengthy catalogue of laws passed against gypsies in pre-Bourbon Spain is likely quickly to conclude that their frequent reiteration or reformulation over two centuries, usually with increased restrictions and penalties, speaks eloquently enough of their failure. In fact, had the Crown ever come close to achieving its objectives of enforced sedentarization or expulsion, by the middle of the seventeenth century there would hardly have remained in Spain a footloose gypsy against whom to legislate. But remain they did, and complaints about their criminality, irreligion and reputedly scandalous lives continued much as before well into the eighteenth century and beyond. This is not to suggest for a moment that the gypsies were not persecuted. They were. The privations endured by those sent off to serve as forzados in Spain's Mediterranean galley squadrons or to toil in the fearsome mercury mines at Almadén are not to be underestimated. But most were not sent, notwithstanding orders like the one prepared in conditions of great secrecy and issued in December 1639, which had demanded that all able-bodied gypsy males be put to the oar.

In fact, it is clear that laws designed to control Spain's gypsies were not, or could not be enforced to anything like the extent desired by the legislators. The difficulties encountered by the Crown in its attempts to enforce its will, to translate its nominal authority into the effective exercise of power, have been the subject of a number of studies over recent years. It is in this context that this chapter will focus specifically on anti-gypsy laws promulgated in the seventeenth century and explore the reasons for what was recognized even by contemporaries as their inefficacy. What emerges is a picture of early modern Spain in which, far though the royal writ was held imperiously to run, the reality at a local level was that demands from the centre were quite often resisted or, one way or another, frustrated. True, the notion that the King represented the embodiment and guarantee of law and justice was one to which most Spaniards readily, even fervently subscribed – at least in theory. Diego Saavedra Fajardo put it thus: ‘Ca así como yaze el alma en el corazón del ome, e por ella vive el cuerpo, e se mantiene, así en el rey yaze la justicia, que es vida e mantenimiento del pueblo y de su señorío.’