The earliest currently known reference to Gypsies is in “The Life of St. George” composed in the monastery of Iberon on Mt. Athos in Greece in 1068. It relates events in Constantinople in 1050, when wild animals plagued an imperial park. The Emperor Constantine Monomachus commissioned the help of "a Samaritan people, descendants of Simon the Magician, who were called Adsincani, and notorious for soothsaying and sorcery, who killed the beasts.  "Atzinganoi," the Byzantine term for Gypsies, is reflected in several other languages: the German "Zigeuner," the French "Tsiganes," the Italian "Zingari," and the Hungarian "Cziganyok." 

Reputations, legends, tales of folklores began to spread regarding the powers, magic and paranormal abilities of the Gypsies.  Through the centuries, their knowledge of nature, warrior energy, art and music and magic prevailed into widespread folklore tales. They were valued as artisans practicing such trades as blacksmithing, locksmithing and tinsmithing and also filled the niche between peasant and master.  When Khubilai Khan died in 1294, the Mongolian Empire began its decline and the borders crept back east, easing pressure on Europe and thus the Gypsy migratons expanded more rapidly. They entered Dubrovnik (modern-day Yugoslavia) before 1362, and had blanketed the Balkans by 1400.  

The Gypsies seemed to prefer Venetian territories such as Crete and Corfu, perhaps because those lands were relatively safe from the constant Turkish incursions.  By 1417, Gypsies were recorded in Germanic cities. In 1418, several thousand Gypsies under a leader called Count Michael showed up in Strassbourg. Gypsies were entering Brussels and Holland by 1420, Bologna in 1422.

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries came as close to a Gypsy Golden Age as there had ever been. Gypsies covered Thrace, Macedonia, Greece, Yugoslavia and Rumania long before the Ottoman Turks conquered those lands.  There was a large Gypsy population at the seaport of Modon on the most popular route to the Holy Land, settled in the Gypsy Quarte, a tent city just inside the city walls sometimes called Little Egypt.

Gypsies were known for their traveling in caravan bands with their conestoga wagons, flat bed wagons with tents on them.  Many rulers and town governments started banning Gypsies, usually citing theft, fortune-telling and sometimes espionage as the reasons.  Gypsy groups entered Great Britain in 1514 and then Norway in 1544 and Finland in 1597.   Othwr Gypsy clans traveled east from the Balkans into Russia, establishing themselves in Siberia by the early sixteenth century.

Gypsies retained their original semi-nomadic lifestyle in the midst of sedentary cultures, keeping their language and strict ideology in order to maintain their unity as a people as well as honoring their ancestral lineage in the midst of strange new cultures.  They were mostly successful until the nations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries grew powerful enough to force the Gypsy majority to settle.  

The Gypsies identity as a separate people is still strong enough for them to remain the brunt of prejudice and hatred, even from the residue of the killing of half a million Gypsies by the Nazis during World War II.  It may only be a few generations until any idea of nomadism is leached out of almost all Gypsies.