But besides the players and their followers, there appeared along the roads of the armies, and in the hiding-places of the woods, other children of misfortune less harmless and far more awful to the people, first of all the gipsies. The gipsies, from their language and the scanty historical records that there are of them, appear to be a race of northern border Indians, who lost their home, and their connection with their Indian relatives, at a time when the transformation of the ancient Sanscrit into the modern and popular languages had already begun. In their wanderings towards the west, which had gone on for centuries, they must have lived in continual intercourse with Arabians, Persians, and Greeks, for the language of these people has had a marked influence on their own. They were possibly, about the year 430 but more probably about 940, in Persia. They appeared about the twelfth century as Ishmaelites and braziers,[41] in Upper Germany. They were settled in the fourteenth century in Cypress, and in the year 1370, as bondsmen is Wallachia. The name of Zingaro or Zitano, is a corruption from their language; they still call themselves Scindians, dwellers on the banks of the Indus; their own statement also, that they came from Little Egypt, may be correct, as Little Egypt appears then to have denoted, not the valley of the Nile, but the frontier lands of Asia. In the year 1417, they came in great hordes, with laughable pretensions and grotesque processions, from Hungary, into Germany, and shortly afterwards into Switzerland, France, and Italy. A band of three hundred grown-up persons, without counting the children, proceeded as far as the Baltic, under the command of a duke and count, on horseback and on foot; the women and children sitting with the baggage on the carts. They were dressed like comedians, and had sporting dogs with them as a sign of noble birth; but when they really hunted, they did so without dogs, and without noise. They showed recommendations and safe-conducts from princes and nobles, and also from the Emperor Sigismund. They asserted that their bishops had commanded them to wander for seven years through the world. But they were great swindlers, and passed their nights in the open air, for better opportunities of stealing. In 1418, they appeared in many parts of Germany, and the same year went under the command of Duke Michael, from Little Egypt into Switzerland. A rendezvous of many hordes seems to have taken place before Zurich. They numbered according to the lowest computation a thousand heads. They had two dukes and two knights, and pretended to have been driven from Egypt by the Turks: they carried much money in their pockets, and maintained that they had received it from their own people at home: they ate and drank well, and also paid well, but they have never shown themselves again like this. From thence they appear to have turned to France and Italy; in 1422, a