Paolo Navigajoso was a scion of the noble Venetian

Venice

Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

 Navigajoso family and third Latin ruler of the island of Lemnos

Lemnos

Lemnos is an island of Greece in the northern part of the Aegean Sea. Administratively the island forms a separate municipality within the Lemnos peripheral unit, which is part of the North Aegean Periphery. The principal town of the island and seat of the municipality is Myrina...

 in Greece

Greece

Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....

.

Paolo was the eldest son and heir of Leonardo Navigajoso

Leonardo Navigajoso

Leonardo Navigajoso was a Venetian nobleman and second Latin ruler of the island of Lemnos in Greece.Leonardo inherited the title of megadux of the Latin Empire and the rule of one half of Lemnos upon the death of his father, Filocalo Navigajoso, in 1214. His two sisters inherited one quarter of...

. Upon his father's death in 1260, he inherited the rule of one half of Lemnos as well as the title of megadux of the Latin Empire

Latin Empire

The Latin Empire or Latin Empire of Constantinople is the name given by historians to the feudal Crusader state founded by the leaders of the Fourth Crusade on lands captured from the Byzantine Empire. It was established after the capture of Constantinople in 1204 and lasted until 1261...

, which he continued to use even though the remnants of the Latin Empire fell to the Byzantine Greeks

Byzantine Greeks

Byzantine Greeks or Byzantines is a conventional term used by modern historians to refer to the medieval Greek or Hellenised citizens of the Byzantine Empire, centered mainly in Constantinople, the southern Balkans, the Greek islands, Asia Minor , Cyprus and the large urban centres of the Near East...

 in 1261. Along with his two brothers, Filippo and Nicolao, and his cousins, Giovanni Foscari and Filocalo Gradenigo, who controlled the other half of the island, he opposed the Byzantines when they attacked the island in 1276 under Licario

Licario

Licario, called Ikarios by the Greek chroniclers, was a Byzantine admiral of Italian origin in the 13th century. At odds with the barons of his native Euboea, he entered the service of the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos , and reconquered many of the Aegean islands for him in the 1270s...

. Licario however persisted, and gradually took the island, as the Latin princes fell in battle. The main fortress of Kastro

Myrina, Greece

Myrina is a former municipality on the island of Lemnos, North Aegean, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Lemnos, of which it is a municipal unit. It covers the west coast of the island, and has a land area of 82.049 km², about 17.2% of the island's...

 continued to resist, and after Paolo was killed in 1277, his widow, a daughter of Angelo Sanudo

Angelo Sanudo

Angelo Sanudo was the second Duke of the Archipelago from 1227, when his father, Marco I, died, until his own death.-Family:Angelo was a son of Marco I Sanudo. According to "The Latins in the Levant. A History of Frankish Greece " by William Miller, Marco I married ... Laskaraina, a woman of the...

, continued to defend it until she was eventually forced to surrender it in 1278.