Rigas Feraios, in Vienna, had entered into…

Rigas Feraios, in Vienna, had entered into communication with general Napoleon Bonaparte, to whom he sent a snuff-boxmade of the root of a bay laurel taken from a ruined temple of Apollo, and eventually he had set out with a view to meeting the general of the Army of Italy in Venice.

While traveling there, he had been betrayed by Demetrios Oikonomos Kozanites, a Greek businessman, had his papers confiscated, and was arrested at Trieste by the Austrian authorities (an ally of the Ottoman Empire, Austria is concerned the French Revolution might provoke similar upheavals in its realm and will later formed the Holy Alliance).

The Habsburg authorities promptly hand him and a small group of co-conspirators over to the Ottoman authorities; they strangle him in Belgrade in the summer of 1798.

At one level Rigas' conspiracy has thus been a miserable failure, but his almost single-handed crusade will serve as an inspiration to subsequent generations of Greek nationalists.

The arrest of Rigas thoroughly alarms both the Ottoman authorities and the hierarchy of the Orthodox church, for it almost coincides with the brief occupation, on the fall of the Venetian republic, of the Ionian Islands in 1797 by the forces of revolutionary France, and with Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798.