In 1898/99, the Greek scholar S. Papadimitriou theorized that the family name and therefore the ancestry of the family was originally Latin, he believed the family surname to be the hellenized form of the Italian name "Guido". This in turn led to speculation that there may have been a direct connection with the Gidos family and &lt;a href="Guy%20of%20Hauteville"&gt;Guy/Guido&lt;/a&gt;, a son of the Norman conqueror of southern Italy, Robert Guiscard, who defected to the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos (ruled 1081–1118) centuries earlier, entered his service and possibly married into the imperial family. On the other hand, in his "Die byzantinische Aussenpolitik zur Zeit der letzten Komnenenkaiser" (1967), W. Hecht cast doubt on their Latin origin, and argued that at any rate, by the time Alexios Gidos appears, the family had been thoroughly Byzantinized and shed their Latin identity. It is however impossible to prove any connection with the son of Robert Guiscard or a Latin origin, Byzantine sources do not treat the family as having a foreign origin.