The Marquisate, alone of the Frankish territories north of the Isthmus, escaped conquest by the Catalans, though, as at Athens, a widow and her child were alone left to defend it. Alberto had married a rich Eubœan heiress, Maria dalle Carceri, a scion of the Lombard family which had come from Verona at the time of the Conquest. By this marriage he had become a hexarch, or owner of one-sixth of that great island, and is so officially described in the Venetian list of Greek rulers. Upon his death, in accordance with the rules of succession laid down in the _Book of the Customs of the Empire of Romania_, the Marquisate was divided in equal shares between his widow and his infant daughter, Guglielma. Maria did not, however, long remain unconsoled; indeed, political considerations counselled an immediate marriage with some one powerful enough to protect her own and her child’s interests from the Catalans of Athens. Hitherto the Wardens of the Northern March had only needed to think of the Greek enemies in front, for all the territory behind them, where Boudonitza was most easily assailable, had been in the hands of Frenchmen and friends. More fortunate than most of the high-born dames of Frankish Greece, the widowed Marchioness had avoided the fate of accepting one of her husband’s conquerors as his successor. Being thus free to choose, she selected as her spouse Andrea Cornaro, a Venetian of good family, a great personage in Crete, and Baron of Skarpanto. Cornaro thus, in 1312, received, by virtue of his marriage, his wife’s moiety of Boudonitza[348], while her daughter conferred the remaining half, by her subsequent union with Bartolommeo Zaccaria, upon a member of that famous Genoese race, which already owned Chios and was about to establish a dynasty in the Morea[349]. Cornaro now came to reside in Eubœa, where self-interest as well as patriotism led him to oppose the claims of Alfonso Fadrique, the new viceroy of the Catalan Duchy of Athens. His opposition and the natural ambition of Fadrique brought down, however, upon the Marquisate the horrors of a Catalan invasion, and it was perhaps on this occasion that Bartolommeo Zaccaria was carried off as a captive and sent to a Sicilian prison, whence he was only released at the intervention of Pope John XXII. It was fortunate for the inhabitants of Boudonitza that Venice included Cornaro in the truce which she made with the Catalans in 1319[350]. Four years later he followed his wife to the grave, and her daughter was thenceforth sole Marchioness.