All Roma were always persecuted – correct? No, it is false, as there were no persecutions of Roma in the entire history of the Ottoman Empire.

Roma in the Ottoman Empire were considered as citizen as any other ones, with one notable exception, namely that they had to pay the haraç – tax – as Christians, even when, as many did, they had converted to the Moslem religion.

Thanks to the Ottoman obsession with tax collection, we have a wonderful tool to study the Roma population from the first Ottoman Tax Register in late XVth to the end of the XVIIth century. Ottoman based their taxes on core families, grouped so in tax units called cemaat. They noted the number of children, the profession of the family head, and the amount of tax to be paid.

From these registers, we can derive many informations:

• that the Roma population remained pretty constant at around 10% of the overall population, this over centuries
• that Roma had many different jobs, from the lowest to the highest, including in the police, the army and the administration
• many Roma were skilled steel smith employed in the armament industry, casting canons and forge swords
• that some Roma were very rich indeed, as their tax bill was several hundred times the average yearly income of a family

There were no anti-Roma laws until the late XVIIth century, and that these very few laws were aimed against Roma fleeing slavery in Walachia and Moldova. There is nothing against Roma from Rumelia, the European part of the Empire.

This situation continued beyond the fall of the Ottoman Empire where the anti-Roma prejudices were rare until recently with the rise of nationalism and of populist politicians, especially after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The Roma were integrated, had jobs, and were part of the general society.