In the winter of 1140, a German king granted the women of a starved-out castle free passage, with whatever each of them could carry on her back. The gates opened. And out came the wives, carrying their husbands.

The war behind it was a dynastic brawl for the German crown: the new king, Conrad the Third, against the mighty House of Welf, a feud so durable its names would echo through Italian politics for centuries. In December 1140 Conrad besieged the castle of Weinsberg, which held for Duke Welf, and hunger did what siege engines could not. The garrison surrendered on terms. And the terms were these: the men of the castle, rebels in arms against their king, could expect the fate of rebels. But the women would go free, each with whatever she could carry on her shoulders. It was meant as mercy of the ordinary kind: a bundle of clothes, a cooking pot, a child.

At the appointed hour the gates swung open, and the first woman came out bent double under the weight of her husband. Behind her came the next, and the next, an entire column of wives staggering down the hill with their men on their backs, past siege lines full of soldiers who had come to watch a surrender and found themselves watching something else entirely. The king's men erupted. This was a trick, an abuse of the letter of the terms, and Duke Frederick demanded it be stopped and the words re-read as they were plainly meant. And King Conrad, watching the column of bent women file past his army, gave the ruling that has been retold for nearly nine hundred years: it does not befit a king, he said, to alter his royal word. The chronicle adds that he laughed as he said it. The men were carried through, and lived.

That chronicle, the Royal Chronicle of Cologne, was set down within about thirty five years, close enough to living memory, and it is our source. Historians still argue over the details, as historians should. The Germans never stopped telling it. And the hill itself voted long ago: it has been called Weibertreu, Wives' Loyalty, for eight centuries, and the ruined castle still stands on top, where you can climb up and stand in the gateway they came through.

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