Manuel, seeing all his schemes overthrown, and perceiving that, as an enemy, he had utterly failed, pretended now to feelings of friendship, and offered peace to the Hungarians. As a further pledge of peace he requested King Stephen III. to permit his brother Béla to reside with him at Constantinople, promising that he would adopt him as his son and heir. Manuel, having no sons to whom he might leave the imperial throne, in all probability secretly cherished the hope that his adopted son would at some future day succeed to the Greek throne, and would also inherit the crown of St. Stephen, and that by this means the two neighboring countries, which he did not succeed in uniting by force of arms, would, in the course of time, become one. Fate, however, seemed to have conspired to frustrate the best laid plans of the Greek emperor. He carried Duke Béla with him to Constantinople, adopted him as his son, declared him his heir, and every thing appeared to point to a happy realization of his ambitious dreams, when unexpectedly a son was born to him, an event which completely upset his calculations. It became now impossible for Manuel to continue to keep the young Hungarian duke at his court, unless, indeed, he wanted to raise a rival to his own son; he, therefore, deprived him of all the distinctions he had heaped upon him, and sent him hurriedly back to his native country, where the throne had just become vacant by the death of Stephen III. Manuel, however, made the young duke take a solemn oath before he allowed him to depart that he would never attack the Greek empire, and this empty formality was all that he was able to achieve in furtherance of his scheme to impose his supremacy upon Hungary. The same duke, however, who had been nurtured in the culture of Greece, and became King of Hungary as Béla III., completely banished Greek influence from the country, and secured its independence for a long time to come.