When one morning in 1435, after a reign of thirty-two years, Antonio’s attendants found him dead in his bed, a Greek as well as an Italian party disputed the succession. The Italian candidate, young Nerio, eldest son of Franco Acciajuoli, baron of Sykaminon, whom the late Duke had adopted as his heir, occupied the city. But the Duchess Maria Melissene and her kinsman, Chalkokondyles, father of the historian and the leading man of Athens, held the castle. Well aware, however, that the Sultan was the real master of the situation, the Greek _archon_ set out for the Turkish Court to obtain Murad II’s consent to this act of usurpation. The Sultan scornfully rejected the bribes of the Athenian diplomatist, threw him into prison, and sent his redoubtable captain, Tourakhan, to occupy Thebes. Even then the Greek Duchess did not abandon all hope of securing Athens for the national cause. Through the historian Phrantzes she made an arrangement with Constantine Palaiologos, the future Emperor, then one of the Despots of the Morea, and the foremost champion of Hellenism, that he should become Duke of Athens, and that she should receive compensation near her old home in the Peloponnese. This scheme would have united nearly all Greece under the Imperial family; but it was doomed to failure. There was a section of Greeks at Athens hostile to Chalkokondyles—for party spirit has always characterised Greek public life—and this section joined the Florentine party, decoyed the Duchess out of the Akropolis, and proclaimed Nerio II. The marriage of the new Duke with the Dowager Duchess[114] and the banishment of the family of Chalkokondyles secured the internal peace of the distracted city; and the Sultan was well content to allow a Florentine princeling to retain the phantom of power so long as he paid his tribute with regularity. The weak and effeminate Nerio II was exactly suited for the part of a Turkish puppet. But, like many feeble rulers, the “lord of Athens and Thebes” seems to have made himself unpopular by his arrogance; and a few years after his accession he was deprived of his throne by an intrigue of his brother, Antonio II. He then retired to Florence, the home of his family, where he had property, to play the part of a prince in exile, if exile it could be called. There he must have been living at the time of the famous Council, an echo of whose decisions we hear in distant Athens, where a Greek priest, of rather more learning than most of his cloth, wrote to the Œcumenical Patriarch on the proper form of public prayer for the Pope. A bailie—so we learn from one of his letters[115]—was then administering the duchy, for Antonio had died in 1441; his infant son, Franco, was absent at the Turkish Court; and his subjects had recalled their former lord to the Akropolis. There he was seen, three years later, by the first antiquary who ever set foot in Frankish Athens, Cyriacus of Ancona, the Pausanias of mediæval Greece.