A History of Frankish Greece (1204-1566) (1908) by William Miller, his mother was "a French dame of high degree", daughter of Macaire de Saint-Ménéhould.
In 1262, his mother reportedly welcomed Baldwin II of Courtenay who was attempting to reclaim the throne of the Latin Empire.
[citation needed] According to Miller, Marco II's maternal grandmother was "Laskaraina", a woman of the Laskaris family.
The "Dictionnaire historique et Généalogique des grandes familles de Grèce, d'Albanie et de Constantinople" (1983) by Mihail-Dimitri Sturdza rejected the theory, based on the silence of Byzantine primary sources.
[citation needed] Marco lost some of his islands to the Byzantine Empire early in his reign, but he recovered them two decades later, in time to leave the whole of the original duchy to his son William I. Marco II had at least two known children.