34th Annual Symposium of the Friends of the GHI

2026 Prize Winner: Lane B. Baker, The Lords of Little Egypt: Romani Immigrants in the Holy Roman Empire, 1417-1498.

The Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize is kindly sponsored by the Friends of the German Historical Institute. Since 1997 the Friends of the German Historical Institute have awarded the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize for the best doctoral dissertation on a topic in German history written at a North American university. Dr. Lane will present “The Lords of Little Egypt: Romani Immigrants in the Holy Roman Empire, 1417-1498,” for his Fritz Stern Prize lecture.

In the early fifteenth century, unexpected newcomers arrived in the Holy Roman Empire. Contemporary observers described them as “baptized heathens,” Egyptians, Tatars, Bohemians, and more. We now recognize these immigrants as members of Germany’s earliest Romani communities, the ancestors of the modern-day Sinti. In the Empire, the Roma were initially welcomed as aristocrats in exile, pious Christian penitents, and popular diviners. Less than a century after their arrival, however, the Empire would banish and outlaw all so-called “Gypsies” from the realm. Drawing on sources as diverse as wall tapestries, monumental tombstones, and urban fiscal accounts, this lecture explains what changed in the Holy Roman Empire in the decades between first encounters and first expulsions. I will argue that the Roma, hardly a “pariah people," successfully adapted to early fifteenth-century German society. Their subsequent marginalization was the result of much larger transformations in charity, hospitality, and attitudes toward strangers at the end of the Middle Ages.

Dr. Lane B. Baker (PhD, Stanford University, 2025) is a historian of medieval western Europe, with a particular interest in marginal and minority communities. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the arrival, adaptation, and later marginalization of Romani communities in fifteenth-century German-speaking cities. At the moment, he is a postdoctoral research fellow at Ghent University, where he is developing a new project on high medieval suburbs. In September, he will join the Universität Zürich as a postdoctoral researcher, exploring the religious identities of late medieval Romani communities.

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