The Chains Europe Forgot: 500 Years of Romani Slave Trade

For over 500 years, the Romani people were enslaved in the Romanian principalities. You were not taught this. Not because it was forgotten, but because remembering it would require reparations.

From the 14th century until abolition in 1856, we were chattel slaves in Wallachia and Moldavia. Longer than the transatlantic slave trade. Longer than most European empires lasted. The silence around this history is not empty space. It is deliberate erasure serving material interests, the interests of states that built wealth on our stolen labour, of churches that held us as property, of a European project that required our elimination to justify itself. But this silence was never complete. It was filled with resistance. With songs sung in chains. With names remembered in the dark.

The Architecture of Bondage

The system was meticulous, codified, and absolute. Roma were classified into three categories of property: 

Crown slaves owned by the state, 

Church slaves owned by monasteries,

and private slaves were owned by boyars and nobility. 

We were robi. Not citizens. Not people. Property.

Families were torn apart at the market like livestock. Children were born into chains, inheriting slave status through the mother, our wombs legislated, our bloodlines commodified. Women were subjected to systematic sexual violence with no recourse, no protection, no acknowledgement. Men were worked to death in fields and workshops that enriched the very institutions claiming moral authority over Europe: the Church, the Crown, and the so-called civilised elite. The legal codes were explicit. The violence was structural. The profit was immense.  

The European Project of Elimination

Whilst Wallachia and Moldavia perfected the economics of Romani enslavement, the rest of Europe was busy with its own eliminationist project. This was not exceptional violence. It was a coordinated policy. In the Holy Roman Empire, Romani people were branded, mutilated, and marked for extermination. Expulsion orders swept across Western Europe like plague edicts. 

In England, the 1530 Egyptians Act made being Romani a capital offence. Our existence itself was criminal. In Spain, we were enslaved in the galleys, chained to oars, and worked until the sea took us. In Sweden, Romani children were stolen and given to "civilised" families, our lineages severed by law.

The slave markets of Wallachia were not an aberration. They were one mechanism in a continent-wide system designed to extract our labour, erase our culture, and justify our annihilation. Every European state has Romani blood on its hands.

The Church's Complicity

Explicitly, the role of the Church, not as bystander, but as architect and beneficiary. Monasteries were among the largest slaveholders in the Romanian principalities. Orthodox and Catholic institutions alike bought, sold, and bred Romani slaves. Monks worked enslaved Roma in vineyards and fields, accumulated wealth from their stolen labour, and justified it with theological racism: we were cursed, uncivilised, beyond salvation, unworthy of the grace they preached on Sundays.

Where were the Church's abolitionist voices? Where was the moral intervention, the prophetic witness, the liberation theology? There was none. The Church did not free us. It profited from us. And when abolition finally came in 1856, it was not the Church that led it; it was the threat of social upheaval, the pressure of economic transformation, the fear that enslaved people would rise and burn it all down.

To this day, no monastery has offered reparations. No bishop has issued an apology. No cardinal has opened the archives. The wealth accumulated from Romani bodies still sits in Church coffers, in land holdings, in the architecture of power that claims moral authority over a continent built on slavery and genocide. The Catholic Church still holds land across Romania traceable to estates worked by enslaved Roma. The Orthodox Church still benefits from centuries of extraction. And both remain silent. We do not forget. We will not let them forget.

The Lies That Justified It All

Every slave system requires a mythology to sustain itself. For Romani enslavement, the lies were familiar: we were inherently criminal, congenitally lazy, incapable of civilisation, cursed by God or nature or blood. The same racist pseudoscience, the same dehumanisation used to justify every atrocity from the Middle Passage to Auschwitz. These narratives didn't die with abolition. They mutated, adapted, survived.

They are alive today in every eviction, every police raid, every headline that frames Romani poverty as cultural failure rather than the legacy of centuries of theft. When they call us criminals, they are repeating slave-owner logic. When they say we "don't want to integrate," they are erasing the fact that we were never allowed citizenship, land, education, or the means of survival. When they evict us from camps and call it progress, they are continuing the work of expulsion orders that date back five centuries. Antigypsyism is not prejudice. It is not biased. It is structural racism rooted in slavery, genocide, and the European project of elimination. It is policy. It has always been policy.

Resistance in Chains

But we resisted. Enslaved Roma escaped into the forests and mountains, forming communities beyond the reach of boyar and priest. We hid children from slave markets, passing them through networks of defiance. We preserved language in whispers, songs in secret, stories in the dark when the masters slept. Romani women, forced into sexual slavery, their children stolen and sold, their bodies legislated as breeding stock, became the keepers of memory. They taught survival. They taught defiance. They passed down the knowledge of herbs and healing, of routes and safe houses, of which masters could be tricked and which had to be endured. They kept the fire. There were revolts. There were fires set in the night, tools left broken, horses set loose, and harvests sabotaged. Small acts and large ones, recorded and unrecorded. The historical record is thin; slave owners did not document resistance, did not want future generations to know we fought back, but oral histories survive. Songs survive. The fact of our survival, our language, our culture intact despite everything designed to break us, is evidence enough.

We were never passive. We were never broken. Some were destroyed. Some did not make it. Children were sold and never returned. Women worked to death. Men killed for defiance. We honour them. We carry their names even when history does not. And when abolition came, it was not a gift from enlightened Europeans. It was the result of centuries of resistance, of economic shifts that made slavery less profitable than wage labour, of the fear—always the fear—that enslaved people would rise.

1856: "Freedom" Without Justice

When slavery was abolished in the Romanian principalities, there was no land redistribution. No reparations. No apology. No acknowledgement of the centuries of theft, of the wealth accumulated, of the lives destroyed. Romani people were "freed" into societies that had built their entire economies on our stolen labour. We were given nothing. No tools. No compensation. No citizenship rights. No access to education or land, or the means of survival.

Former slaves became landless labourers, beggars, itinerants—not because of culture, but because of policy. The same elites who had owned us now criminalised our poverty. The same Church that had enslaved us now offered charity instead of restitution, alms instead of land. Abolition without justice is not liberation. It is abandonment.

And so we survived in the margins, as we always had. We continued the work we had always done—metalwork, music, horse trading, basket weaving, but now without legal protection, without recognition, without safety. The skills that had been extracted under slavery were now called "backwards." The mobility forced upon us by exclusion was now called "refusal to settle." Our survival strategies were criminalised. Post-abolition, the violence did not end. It shifted form.

Romani people were pushed into slums, denied housing, subjected to forced sterilisation campaigns that continued into the 21st century, marked for elimination again and again. The through-line is unbroken: from slavery to criminalisation to segregation to genocide. In the 20th century, this culminated in the Porajmos—the Romani Holocaust—in which up to 500,000 Roma were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.

The logic of the Porajmos was not new. It was the logic of enslavement perfected: we were Untermenschen, subhuman, fit only for labour or extermination. Nazi racial science drew directly from the same pseudoscientific racism that justified slavery. Post-abolition criminalisation made us visible, vulnerable, and easy to round up. The camps were full of Roma who had been arrested for "vagrancy"—for being landless in a society that had denied us land. The Holocaust did not come from nowhere. It came from centuries of European antigypsyism, from slavery, from the eliminationist policies that every European state enacted.

And after the war, there were no reparations for the Roma. No recognition. The Porajmos was not named in Nuremberg. Romani survivors were denied compensation, told they had been arrested as criminals, not victims. Some were sent back to the camps, this time as "displaced persons." The continuity of violence is not a metaphor. It is a material reality.

The Continuity of Violence

Medieval persecution led to centuries of enslavement, which led to the Porajmos, which led to contemporary systemic discrimination. Europe does not want to see this continuity because acknowledging it requires confronting the complicity of the Church in profiting from Romani bodies, the failure of liberal democracy to extend rights to Roma even as other abolitionist movements gained ground, the ongoing theft of Romani labour, culture, and land without recognition or redress, and the fact that antigypsyism is not a relic of the past—it is policy, it is law, it is structure.

When Romani families are evicted from camps with nowhere to go, that is the legacy of abolition without land. When Romani children are disproportionately placed in segregated schools or taken by social services, that is the legacy of a system that has always stolen our children. When Romani women face forced sterilisation, sexual violence, and maternal mortality rates higher than any other group in Europe, that is the legacy of enslavement that treated our bodies as property. The structures have not been dismantled. They have been renamed, repackaged, and made palatable for liberal democracies that claim to have moved beyond racism. But we know better.

What We Are Owed

So what are we owed? Not inclusion. Not diversity initiatives. Not a seat at the table built from our bones. We are owed reparations. From the Romanian state, which built its agricultural economy on stolen Romani labour and has never acknowledged it, never compensated it, never returned what was taken. From the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, which held us as property, accumulated wealth from our bodies, and continue to hold land and capital traceable to slavery. From the European institutions, universities built on Enlightenment philosophy that excluded us, museums that display our culture as artefacts whilst erasing our history, and governments that continue to benefit from the erasure of this history.

We are owed land. The land our ancestors worked for centuries without compensation. The land we were denied after the abolition. The land from which we are still evicted, criminalised, expelled. Land is not symbolic. It is the material basis of survival, autonomy, and power. Without land, there is no food sovereignty, no housing security, no economic independence. Land is what was stolen. Land is what must be returned.

We are owed power. Not representation decided by non-Roma. Not tokenism in NGOs that speak for us without us. Not the performance of inclusion whilst policy remains unchanged. We demand self-determination. Romani-led institutions with funding and authority. Romani control over our own narratives, our own histories, our own futures. 

Romani women are at the centre of decision-making, as we have always been in our communities, as we are now in organisations like ERIAC, WOMNET, and Roma Rising. These are not requests. These are debts. And they will be paid either through justice or through the continued resistance that has never stopped, that will never stop.

Why the Silence?

Historical erasure is a political strategy. If Romani enslavement remains unknown, then modern Europeans can claim ignorance of their antigypsyist legacy, governments avoid reparations and systemic accountability, Romani marginalisation can be framed as "cultural" rather than the result of state-sanctioned oppression, and our resistance can be ignored, our history stolen, our voices silenced. But we remember. We have always remembered. In songs, in stories, in the way we teach our children who they are and where they come from. Memory is resistance. Memory is survival. And we will make them remember.

This Is Labour History

What the Romani enslavement was: the extraction of surplus value from racialised bodies to build European capitalism. This is not just racial history. This is labour history. Enslaved Roma were agricultural workers, metalworkers, domestic workers, and artisans. Our labour built the estates, filled the Church coffers, sustained the feudal economy of the Romanian principalities and funded its transition to capitalism.

When European socialists talk about the history of labour, they must talk about us. When they talk about primitive accumulation, about the violent origins of capital, they must talk about Romani enslavement. There is no European working-class history that does not include us. There is no socialist politics that can ignore the fact that we were enslaved whilst European workers were being "freed" into wage labour. Our liberation is inseparable from the liberation of all workers. But it requires specific recognition, specific reparations, specific redistribution of the wealth stolen from us. This is not identity politics. This is a class struggle that takes race seriously, that understands how capitalism was built on racialised slavery, that refuses to subordinate Romani liberation to some future "after the revolution." No. Our liberation is the revolution.

Roma Rising: Our Inheritance Is Resistance

This platform exists because Romani women refused silence. Roma Rising was born from the women's meetings at ERIAC, from WOMNET gatherings where we named the violence and claimed our power. We are the descendants of women who survived slavery, who hid children from markets, who kept language alive in whispers, who taught defiance in the dark. We are the inheritors of resistance.

We see it in every Romani-led organisation fighting for housing justice—like the European Roma Rights Centre, like Roma Support Group, like the grassroots networks across Europe organising against evictions. We see it in every Romani scholar reclaiming our history—like Dr Ethel Brooks, like Dr Margareta Matache, like the historians and archivists doing the work of recovery against institutional resistance. We see it in every Romani artist refusing assimilation—like Selma Selman, like Delaine Le Bas, like the musicians and poets and filmmakers telling our stories on our terms. We see it in every Romani woman standing at the front of the liberation movement, as we have always done, as we will always do.

We are still here. Still singing. Still fighting. This is not ancient history. This is the foundation upon which contemporary Europe stands. The wealth accumulated through Romani enslavement funded the churches, the estates, and the institutions that still hold power today. We will not let them forget. We will not let them erase us again.

No Liberation Without Romani Liberation

The fight against fascism is the fight against antigypsyism. The fight for workers' rights is the fight for Romani reparations. The fight for decolonisation is the fight to dismantle the structures that enslaved us, that continue to exploit us, that deny us land and power and future. There is no European socialism that does not centre Romani liberation. There is no anti-racist movement that does not confront the slavery that they will not teach. There is no justice that does not include us.

We are not asking for solidarity. We are demanding it. And we are building power—in our communities, in our organising, in our refusal to disappear, in our insistence that this history be told, that these debts be paid, that our children inherit not just survival but liberation. The chains were broken in 1856, but the fight for true freedom has never stopped. It will not stop until we have land. Until we have reparations. Until we have power. Until Europe reckons with what it did to us, what it continues to do to us, what it owes us.

🏴 Opre Roma — Rise up, Roma. Our battle cry. Our promise. Our future.