>>17870383
Nothing, actually. Every small thing they could bring onto the table, was heavily overshadowed by all the bad things they did.
A clash between christian piety, and secular pragmatism is what allowed them to live for this long: For every man that wanted them gone, there was two or three more who saw them as brothers in Christ who didn't deserve to be exterminated to the last child. And of course, not every ruler is Vlad the Impaler, who massacred a whole clan because of them doing gypsy things in his territory.
In Spain, the marquis of Ensenada tried to kill all of them, but between the spaniards of the time hiding gypsies from the authorities (quite the pious people), and the horrible nightmares king Ferdinand VI had, which he himself attributed to God, he was forced to stop the persecutions. Gypsies in Spain spit on his image every few months for this, or at least the very few ones who managed to reach that level of scholarship to know about him
