Bediani (title)

Bediani (Georgian: ბედიანი) was a medieval title, or a territorial epithet, of the Dadiani, the ruling family of Mingrelia in western Georgia, derived from the canton of Bedia, in Abkhazia, and in use from the end of the 12th century into the 15th. Bediani was occasionally used as a praenomen. The extent of the fief of Bedia is difficult to define; by the latter half of the 17th century, the Shervashidze of Abkhazia had supplanted the Dadiani in that area.

The title of Bediani should not be confused with that of Bedieli, which, although derived from the same toponym, was the one used by the bishops seated at the Bedia Cathedral.

Bediani appears in the Georgian—both narrative and epigraphic—and Western European sources from the early 13th century to the latter half of the 15th century, first in the Histories and Eulogies of the Sovereigns, a part of the Georgian Chronicles, in the list of the Georgian "dukes" (eristavi) under Queen Tamar (r. 1184–1213). In the 15th century, Bediani (Bedias, Bendian) was used as a designation of the Prince of Mingrelia (e.g., Bendian rex Mingreliae) by the Italian visitors to the Caucasus—Ludovico da Bologna in 1460 and Giosafat Barbaro and Ambrogio Contarini in the early 1470s. Barbaro, further, reported that Bendiani of Mingrelia possessed, inter alia, two fortified cities on the Black Sea, called Vathi and Sauastopoli, the former identified with Batumi, then in Guria, and the latter being Sukhumi in Abkhazia.

...
Wikipedia