Victories of the Counter-Revolution 503
for their peoples under Ottoman rule. The first Greek and Serbian newspapers
were published at Vienna in 1790 and 1791; in 1792 Francis II gave his consent to
a new project for a paper in the Cyrillic alphabet, on condition that it emphasize
only the evils in the French and Belgian revolutions. For Rumanians and Greeks
the contacts with France were important. The first Rumanian newspaper, Courier
de Moldavie, was published in French and Rumanian in 1790; it lasted less than a
year but printed news of the French Revolution.
Events, as such, were not yet of much importance, and those of political signifi-
cance occurred on the Hapsburg side of the border. A congress of Serbs met in
southern Hungary in 1790. The excitement in Croatia over the French Revolution
has already been mentioned. The Vlachs of Transylvania (the Rumanian- speaking
people, mostly peasants, among whom Magyar landowners and German burghers
lived), obtaining assistance from one of the modern- minded Austrian officials,
presented a petition to the Emperor and to the Diet of Transylvania in 1791.
Called the Supplex Iibellus Valachorum, it requested equality for the Vlachs with the
Magyars and “Saxons,” or Transylvanian Germans. It asked for representation of
Vlachs in the diet, and revealed a knowledge of the French Revolution in propos-
ing an administrative reorganization into territorial “departments,” which should
be named after mountains and rivers, so that old memories might be lost.^47 The
Diet of Transylvania, however, was composed of Magyar landlords. Leopold soon
died, Francis succeeded, and war with France began. Nothing was done on the
Vlach petition. Of the Transylvanian Vlachs it may be said that they, too, suc-
cumbed to the general counterrevolution in Eastern Europe.
It was among the Greeks that the beginnings of political action were most evi-
dent. The word then had a wide reference, including, in addition to Greeks living
in Greece, persons throughout Rumania, the Balkan peninsula, and Asia Minor
who were Greek in religion and language. The Greeks had connections both with
central Europe and with France. Adamantios Korais went as a medical student
from Smyrna to France shortly before the Revolution; he remained in France for
many years, and became known as the father of the Greek cultural revival. His
more active compatriot, Rhigas Velestinlis, organized a conspiracy in Vienna. His
dream, in effect, was to convert the Ottoman Empire into a Greek one, undoing
the Turkish conquest of 1453. He was impressed by the Cisalpine and Ligurian
republics, formed in northern Italy under French auspices in 1797. In that year the
French also occupied the Ionian Islands, only a few miles from the coast of main-
land Greece itself. A secret assembly of Greeks from many parts of the Hellenic
world met in the Peloponnesus; it began to plan revolution against the Sultan, and
requested aid from the French army. Meanwhile Rhigas, in Vienna, wrote songs
and pamphlets for a Greek revolution, including a proposed constitution modeled
on the French. The Austrian police discovered him and several companions, and
turned them over to the Turkish authorities, by whom they were executed in 1798
at Belgrade.^48
47 N. Iorga, Histoire des Roumains de Transylvanie et de Hongrie, 2 vols. (Bucharest, 1915), II, 216–
25; E. Pascu, “Mémoires et protestations des Roumains de Transylvanie et de Hongrie de 1791 à
1892,” in Revue de Transylvanie, V (1939), 326–36.
48 A. Descalakis, Rhigas Velestinlis: la Révolution française et les préludes de l ’ indépendance hellénique