Constantine had been married twice. His first wife Maddalena- Theodora Tocco had died in 1429. His second wife Caterina Gattilusio died in 1442. Neither had borne him any children. All the efforts of George Sphrantzes and others to find him a third wife had failed. He therefore died unmarried and without issue. The facts are confirmed by documentary evidence. In December 1494 his nephew Andrew Palaiologos, son of the Despot Thomas of the Morea, formally ceded his rights to the Byzantine throne to King Charles VIII of France. In the document which he drafted Andrew makes specific mention of the fact that his uncle Constantine had died childless and without an heir to his imperial title (Constantini Palaeologi sui patrui sine liberis defuncti). The myth none the less persisted that Constantine left a widowed Empress and a son or daughters. It may have been propagated by the Slavonic versions of the Diary of Nestor Iskinder. Yet it had already been suggested in the letter that Aeneas Sylvius wrote to Pope Nicholas V in July 1453; and it was enshrined in the account of the capture of the city which the same Aeneas incorporated into his Cosmographia. He related how the Sultan Mehmed, at the drunken celebration of his triumph, had the wife of the Emperor Constantine, his daughters and the leading matrons of the court brought to his presence, defiled and then murdered. Elsewhere Aeneas writes of Constantine's son escaping to Pera (Galata). A French chronicler, Matthieu de Coucy, who died in 1461, alleges that the Sultan ravished Constantine's widow in the church of St Sophia and then shut her up in his seraglio.