Levedi, or Lebed, Levedias, Lebedias, and Lebedi was a Hungarian chieftain, the first known chieftain of the Hungarians. According to Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus' De administrando imperio, because of the alliance and the courage shown by the Hungarian people in all the wars they fought with the Khazars, Levedi, the first voivode of the Hungarians, who was also famous for his valor, was given a Khazar princess in marriage "so that she might have children by him". However, as it turned out, Levedi did not produce offspring with this lady. Later, after the Khazars defeated the Perchengs and forced them to resettle in the land of the Hungarians, whom they defeated and split in two, the Khazars picked Levedi, the "first among the Hungarians" and sought to make him the prince of the Hungarian tribes so that he "may be obedient to the [Khazars'] word and [their] command". Thus, according to Constantine, the Khazar khagan initiated the centralization of the command of the Hungarian tribes in order to strengthen his own suzerainty over them. Levedi, however, refused, because he wasn't "strong enough for this rule". Instead, Constantine claims, Levedi proposed another Hungarian voivode, Álmos or his son Árpád as prince of the Hungarians. The Magyar settlement between the Volga river and the Urals the mountains were named Lebedia, soon to become Levedia, after Levedi. Name and title The only source of Levedi's life is the De administrando imperio, a book written by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus around 950. According to one theory, the name is derived from the common Slavic word "Lebedi", swan. According to historian Omeljan Pritsak, Levedi's name―which was actually a title―derived from the Turkic expression "alp edi", or "brave lord". The Hungarian historian Gyula Kristó, who refuses Pritsak's theory, says that Levedi's name is connected to the Hungarian verb "lesz" ("be"). Other scholars agree that the origin of the name is probably Finno-Ugric. It derives from "the participle of the old lesz ('will be') verb lës (meaning levő - 'being') with the diminutive suffix -di." A similar proper name (Lewedi) was recorded in a Hungarian charter, issued in 1138. It has also been put forward that the land, Lebedi, did not derive its name from the chieftain, but the other way around. Thus, the voivode had gotten his name from the land. However, Kristó says that this would be in contrast with the source and the Hungarian