Certainly Gitanos and Gitanas confessed before Don
Martin Fajardo that they did not really marry, but that in their
banquets and festivals they selected the woman whom they liked, and
that it was lawful for them to have as many as three mistresses,
and on that account they begat so many children. They never keep
fasts nor any ecclesiastical command. They always eat meat, Friday
and Lent not excepted; the morning when I seized those whom I
afterwards executed, which was in Lent, they had three lambs which
they intended to eat for their dinner that day. - Quinones, page
13.
Although what is stated in the above extracts, respecting the
marriages of the Gitanos and their licentious manner of living, is,
for the most part, incorrect, there is no reason to conclude the
same with respect to their want of religion in the olden time, and
their slight regard for the forms and observances of the church, as
their behaviour at the present day serves to confirm what is said
on those points. From the whole, we may form a tolerably correct
idea of the opinions of the time respecting the Gitanos in matters
of morality and religion. A very natural question now seems to
present itself, namely, what steps did the government of Spain,
civil and ecclesiastical, which has so often trumpeted its zeal in
the cause of what it calls the Christian religion, which has so
often been the scourge of the Jew, of the Mahometan, and of the
professors of the reformed faith; what steps did it take towards
converting, punishing, and rooting out from Spain, a sect of demi-
atheists, who, besides being cheats and robbers, displayed the most
marked indifference for the forms of the Catholic religion, and
presumed to eat flesh every day, and to intermarry with their
relations, without paying the vicegerent of Christ here on earth
for permission so to do?
The Gitanos have at all times, since their first appearance in
Spain, been notorious for their contempt of religious observances;
yet there is no proof that they were subjected to persecution on
that account.
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