Andrei Mocioni

Andrei Mocioni de Foen was an Austrian and Hungarian jurist, politician, and informal leader of the ethnic Romanian community, one of the founding members of the Romanian Academy. Of a mixed Aromanian and Albanian background, raised as a Greek Orthodox, he belonged to the Mocioni family, which had been elevated to Hungarian nobility. He was brought up at his family estate in the Banat, at Foeni, where he joined the administrative apparatus, and identified as a Romanian since at least the 1830s. He rose to prominence during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848: he was a supporter of the House of Lorraine, trying to obtain increased autonomy for Banat Romanians in exchange for loyalism. The Austrians appointed Mocioni to an executive position over that region, but curbed his expectations by including the Banat as a whole into the Voivodeship of Serbia. This disappointment pushed Mocioni to renounce politics during much of the 1850s.