thus moved to seize Arta, the ancient capital of the despotate. After taking it from the local Albanians, Carlo I ceremonially entered the city in October 1416. According to his own chroniclers, the locals perceived Carlo I's conquest of Arta to be a great victory. Carlo I had successfully united the Greeks of Epirus under a single realm once more, something that his chroniclers wrote "could not have been done in the last two hundred years". Around the end of 1426, conflict began again between Carlo I and the Byzantine Despotate of the Morea, when Carlo I attacked a contingent of Albanian soldiers in the Peloponnese that fought for Despot Theodore II Palaiologos (1407–1443). Carlo I also occupied territories in the northwestern parts of Theodore II's domain. In 1427, Emperor John VIII Palaiologos (1425–1448) personally set out to deal with Carlo I, bringing his younger brother Constantine with him. On 26 December 1427, the two brothers reached Mystras, the capital of the Morea, and made their way to the town of Glarentza, which was captured by the Tocchi forces. In the Battle of the Echinades, a naval skirmish off the coast of Glarentza, Carlo I was defeated and he agreed to relinquish his conquests in the Morea. In order to seal the peace, Tocco offered his niece, Maddalena Tocco (whose name was later changed to the Greek Theodora), in marriage to Constantine, her dowry being Glarentza and the other Moreot territories held by Carlo I. Glarentza was given to the Byzantines on 1 May 1428 and on 1 July, Constantine married Theodora. As such, Carlo I's defeat was not nearly as catastrophic as it could have been; though he was defeated militarily, he also gained a close connection to the Byzantine imperial family. Carlo I probably died in June 1429, and his domains were plunged into chaos. Less than a year after his death, the important town of Ioannina had already been captured by the Ottoman Empire, and his legitimate heir, his nephew Carlo II Tocco, was engaged with Carlo I's illegitimate sons in a war of inheritance. Though successful against his cousins in retaining power, by the time of his death around 1448 Carlo II had lost nearly all of his possessions on the mainland to the Ottoman Empire. Although Carlo II was, according to historian Nada Zečević, often blamed in past scholarship for the loss of these territories,