of royal prerogatives, including coinage. The half-denars minted for him bore the inscription BELA DUX ("Duke Béla"). According to Steinhübel, the mid-11th-century timber and earth walls of the fortress of Nyitra were erected in Béla's reign. The two brothers closely collaborated in the subsequent years. According to the Illuminated Chronicle, they together worked out a military strategy against the Germans, who were frequently invading the kingdom in the early 1050s. Ferenc Makk writes that Béla's epithetsthe Champion or the Wisentare connected to his fighting against the Germans. The chronicler emphasizes that Andrew and Béla "lived in a great tranquillity of peace" even after Andrew fathered a son, Solomon, in 1053. Béla was one of the lords witnessing the deed of the foundation of the Tihany Abbey, a Benedictine monastery that his brother established in 1055. The two brothers' good relationship deteriorated after King Andrew had the child Solomon crowned king in 1057 or 1058. The coronation was the consequence of the peace negotiations with the Holy Roman Empire, because the Germans did not acquiesce in a marriage between Solomon and Judiththe sister of the young German monarch, Henry IVuntil Solomon's right to succeed his father was declared and publicly confirmed. Thereafter Andrew was determined to secure the throne for his son. He invited Béla to his manor in Tiszavárkony, where the King offered his brother a seemingly free choice between a crown and a sword (which were the symbols of the royal and ducal power, respectively). However, he had ordered that Béla be murdered if he chose the crown. Having been informed of his brother's secret plan by one of his own partisans in the royal court, Béla opted for the sword, but he departed for Poland after the meeting. He returned to Hungary, in the autumn of 1060, with Polish troops that Duke Boleslaus the Bold of Poland had provided. Around the same time, German reinforcements arrived in Hungary to assist Andrew against Béla. The ensuing civil war ended with the victory of Béla, who defeated his brother in two successive battles fought at the river Tisza and at Moson. The King was seriously injured and died soon afterward. His partisans took his son, the child Solomon, to Germany. Reign (1060–1063) Béla was crowned king in Székesfehérvár on 6 December 1060. He ordered that "the wives and sons and all the property of all those who had followed" his