Note 38 — THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF ANDREW BATTELL OF LEIGH IN ESSEX, SENT BY THE PORTUGALS PRISONER TO ANGOLA, WHO LIVED THERE, AND IN THE ADJOINING REGIONS, NEAR EIGHTEEN YEARS.
Reading edition
The Egyptians were, of course, Ciganos, or gypsies. They appeared in Portugal in the beginning of the sixteenth century. A Royal order of 1526 ordered them to leave the kingdom, but appears to have had no more effect than a law of 1538, which, on account of the thefts of which they were accused, and their sorceries, threatened them with a flogging and the confiscation of their goods, if caught within the kingdom. This law was re-enacted in 1557, when the galleys were substituted for a flogging; and in 1592 a still more severe law was enacted, which threatened with death all those who should not quit the kingdom within four months. Battel’s associates were, no doubt, gipsies who had been sent as convicts to Angola (see F. A. Coelho, Os Ciganos de Portugal, Lisbon, 1892).
The Moriscoes are the Moors of Morocco. Early Portuguese writers refer to the men who had fought in Africa (Morocco) as Africanos, and Battell’s Moriscoes were in all probability Moorish prisoners of war, or Moors expelled from Portugal.