Leo Passianos was the Byzantine

Byzantine

Byzantine usually refers to the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages.Byzantine may also refer to:* A citizen of the Byzantine Empire, or native Greek during the Middle Ages...

 general

General

A general officer is an officer of high military rank, usually in the army, and in some nations, the air force. The term is widely used by many nations of the world, and when a country uses a different term, there is an equivalent title given....

 sent by the Catapan of Italy

Catapanate of Italy

The Catepanate of Italy was a province of the Byzantine Empire, comprising mainland Italy south of a line drawn from Monte Gargano to the Gulf of Salerno. Amalfi and Naples, although north of that line, maintained allegiance to Constantinople through the catepan...

 Leo Tornikios Kontoleon

Leo Tornikios Kontoleon

Kontoleon Tornikios was the Catapan of Italy from May to September 1017. He was originally the strategos of Cephallenia. As strategos, he accompanied the catapan Basil Mesardonites to Apulia in 1011. Basil died in 1016 and Leo was nominated to replace him, arriving in May. At the time, Melus of...

 to fight the Lombard

Lombards

The Lombards , also referred to as Longobards, were a Germanic tribe of Scandinavian origin, who from 568 to 774 ruled a Kingdom in Italy...

 rebel Melus of Bari

Melus of Bari

Melus was a Lombard nobleman from the Apulian town of Bari, whose ambition to carve for himself an autonomous territory from the Byzantine catapanate of Italy in the early 11th century inadvertently sparked the Norman presence in southern Italy.Melus and his brother-in-law Dattus rebelled in 1009...

 in 1017. He is not to be confused with the other Passianos killed in Melus' first rebellion while fighting the Saracens under Ishmael of Montepeloso.

Passianos met Melus on the Fortore

Fortore

The Fortore is a river which flows through the provinces of Benevento, Campobasso and Foggia in southern Italy. It has a length of 110 km....

 at Arenula. The battle was either indecisive (William of Apulia

William of Apulia

William of Apulia was a chronicler of the Normans, writing in the 1090s. His Latin epic, Gesta Roberti Wiscardi , written in hexameters, is one of the principal contemporary sources for the Norman conquest of southern Italy, especially the career of Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia . It was composed...

) or a victory for Melus (Leo of Ostia

Leo of Ostia

Leo Marsicanus or Ostiensis , also known as Leone dei Conti di Marsi , was a nobleman and monk of Monte Cassino around 1061 and Italian cardinal from the twelfth century.In Monte Cassino, he became a friend of Desiderius of Benevento, later Pope Victor III, and it was to him that Leo dedicated...

). Tornikios then took command himself and led them into a second encounter near Civita

Civita, Italy

Civita is a hilltown and comune in the province of Cosenza in the Calabria region of southern Italy. Facing the Ionian Sea, it is part of the Pollino National Park....

. This second battle was a victory for Melus, though Lupus Protospatharius

Lupus Protospatharius

Lupus Protospatharius Barensis was the reputed author of the Chronicon rerum in regno Neapolitano gestarum , a precise history of the Mezzogiorno from 805 to 1102. He has only been named as the author since the seventeenth century...

 and the anonymous chronicler of Bari record a defeat. Passianos was killed in this battle.

Sources

• Chalandon, Ferdinand. Histoire de la domination normande en Italie et en Sicile. Paris
  Paris
  Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
  
  , 1907.