being perceived as a "weak ruler", the fall of the Tocco territories was an outcome of a much broader Ottoman advance across the Balkans in the 15th century. Even Carlo II's stronger neighbors, notably the Byzantine Empire, were powerless to stop the rise of the Ottomans. Carlo II was succeeded by his son, Leonardo III Tocco, who inherited the despotate as a minor. In March 1449, the Ottomans captured Arta. Though several contemporary sources describe Leonardo III as an exceptional ruler and his domain as prosperous and stable, his tenure as Despot of Epirus and Count Palatine of Cephalonia and Zakynthos ended in catastrophe, with the Ottomans seizing his final possessions in Greece in 1479 and his family being forced into exile, returning to Naples, where they still had living relatives, descendants of other sons of Guglielmo Tocco. Ottoman conquest was a fate that none of the contemporary minor rulers in the Balkans could escape. The Ottoman campaign against Leonardo III had completed the Turkish conquest of mainland Greece; Leonardo had been one of the last independent Latin rulers in the region. There is no universally accepted historical assessment of the Tocco family's rule and ambitions in Greece. According to Zečević, the two largest schools of thought view the Tocchi as either minor nobles who simply obtained the legitimate administrative positions in service of the Angevin kings in Greece, or as adventurers in search for power and fortune in the ruins of the once powerful Byzantine Empire. Exiles in Italy Leonardo III spent the rest of his life in Naples trying to come up with ways to retake his territories in Greece. He did not take his early years in exile well, perceiving his exile as unjust, and lamenting his decline in status. In 1480, while he was attempting to secure support from powerful feudal lords in southern Italy to aid him in retaking his Greek domains, Leonardo III reportedly said, in regards to his family, that "we may have lost our rings but we still did not lose our fingers", a sentence Zečević writes "would long afterwards be quoted as the key illustration of the family's pragmatism". Some members of the family adopted to life in Italy quite well. Leonardo III's brother, Giovanni Tocco, became protonotary apostolic in Rome and Leonardo III's oldest son and heir, Carlo III Tocco, served the Sforza family of Milan, and later Holy Roman