In the second half of the 18th century, the Habsburg monarchy undertook a series of measures designed to forcibly assimilate the Roma and suppress their nomadic lifestyle. The most severe of these decrees came in 1783 when the emperor Joseph II implemented a raft of policies which included forbidding the Roma from trading horses, living in tents, speaking Romani or even marrying another Romani person. They also finally emancipated the last slaves in Transylvania. The decrees seem to have rarely been implemented in full, which prevented the cultural extermination of the Roma, but they were very effective in promoting the sedentarisation of Gypsies in those areas of today's Romania then under Habsburg control.
