Reprieve Instead of Death (in Trials of Gypsies in Bohemia in the First Half of the 18th century) or how not to Count History
Abstract
The article is concerned with the persecution of Gypsies in Bohemia in the first third of the 18th century. As in other European countries, in cases where Gypsies had been already formally expelled from a land, Gypsy vagabondage was defined and punished as a capital crime.
The article does not forget this normative aspect of the theme, but it nonetheless concentrates on the actual practice of persecution and above all on cases in which condemned Gypsies begged for mercy and their death penalty was in fact reduced to a more moderate punishment. The author also looks at the extensive powers of reprieve that the Prague Appellate Court was granted by the ruler in the 1720s.
Condemned Gypsies were not explicitly mentioned in this context, but there is plenty of evidence that they were not excluded from this practice of reprieve. The article critises the view of the persecution of Gypsies that is based solely on the quantification of incomplete data in the manuals of condemnation of the Appellate Court.
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