The fiery revolutionary Rigas Feraios had served a number of Phanariote hospodars in the Danubian principalities, and has spent part of the 1790s in Vienna.
A Hellenized Vlach from Thessaly, in Vienna he has comes under the influence of the French Revolution, as is manifest in a number of revolutionary tracts he has printed, intending to distribute them in an effort to stimulate a Pan-Balkan uprising against the Ottomans.
These tracts include a “Declaration of the Rights of Man” and a “New Political Constitution of the Inhabitants of Rumeli, Asia Minor, the Islands of the Aegean, and the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia.”
The latter proposes the establishment of what, in essence, would be a revived Byzantine Empire, but an empire in which monarchical institutions would be replaced by republican institutions on the French model.
Rigas' insistence on the cultural predominance of the Greeks, however, and on the use of the Greek language, means that his schemes have little potential interest for the other peoples of the Balkan Peninsula.
In any case, Rigas' ambitious schemes come to naught.