Story
The story of Riquewihr
Riquewihr owes its town status, so the story goes, to a glass of wine. In 1269 Rudolf of Habsburg, the future emperor, besieged the nearby castle of Reichenstein, whose lords had earned a bad name as robber knights; the two brothers who held it were sentenced to death and hanged from an oak.
Afterwards Rudolf rode into the village and shared a glass of wine with the people. The next day he declared that Riquewihr deserved to become a town: thanks to that 'devil of a wine', the elders of the council had addressed him with the familiar 'tu', and he did not want anyone to say he let peasants do the same.
In 1291 Burkhardt II of Horbourg surrounded the place with a rectangular wall and a wide, deep ditch, making it a small fortress 300 metres long. Spared from the destruction of both world wars, Riquewihr looks today more or less as it did in the 16th century.
This story is compiled from Wikipedia and other open sources; dates and numbers are checked against the source. The text is shared under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Source ↗
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