The Rom first enteredMoravia at the beginning of the fifteenth century and in the course of time their numhers increased. Because of their distincteness, different lifestyle and hehaviour the majoritě society accepted them with mistrust, uneasiness andgrowing antagonism. These negative attitudes resulted in repressive normative acts that represented the basis of restriction, banishment and persecution of the Rom immigrants. The anti-Rom manhunts started in the sixteenth century, continued and escalated in the next decades and culminated in the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The discrimination and persecution then continued, in a somewhat more moderate character, and didn ’t stop even in the rule oflaw: in the Austrian monarchy as well as in the democratic Czechoslovakia the Rom kept being citizens of the second rank.