On 16 March 1355 the Venetian baillie in Constantinople wrote to his colleague in Negroponte deploring the pitiful state of the Byzantine Empire which was almost at its last extremity. He hinted that the best course would be for Venice to take it over before the Turks conquered it. The Doge and his advisers had grave misgivings about the new Emperor, John V. He was barely twenty-three years of age and he had had little experience of government. He was also, or so it seemed, too partial to the Genoese. In June 1355 he confirmed them in possession of Chios for a peppercorn rent of 500 hyperpyra a year. In July he rewarded the adventurer Francesco Gattilusio, who had helped him enter Constantinople, by making him his brother-in-law and granting him the island of Lesbos as an imperial fief. Just before the outbreak of their war with Genoa, in 1350, the Venetians had thought to offset the Genoese occupation of Chios by obtaining for themselves the Ionian islands of Corfu, Cephalonia and Zante, which then belonged to the Angevin rulers of Naples. They offered to buy them for the sum of 50,000 ducats. In January 1351 the Senate went so far as to nominate a Venetian captain and rector for Corfu, a castellan for Butrinto on the Albanian coast, a count for Cephalonia and a castellan for Zante. The matter went no further at that time, though the island of Leukas or Santa Mavra passed into Venetian hands a few years later. Corfu would have been a most valuable acquisition for Venice, standing as it does at the entrance to the Gulf or the Adriatic.