In the days when the Saxon counts held sway over the eastern marches and the Thuringian forests echoed with the sound of hunting horns, there lived a great lord named Friedrich, Count Palatine of Saxony. His seat was at Weißenburg, a strong castle upon the Unstrut, where the river winds down toward the Saale. And he had taken to wife a noble lady, Adelheid by name, daughter of the Margrave of Stade, a woman of such beauty that minstrels sang of her from the Rhine to the Elbe.
But beauty is a snare, and the heart of a great lady is not always content with the lord she is given in marriage.

Now it came to pass that a young count of Thuringia, Ludwig by name, came often to the court at Weißenburg. He was a bold rider and a keen huntsman, and his lands lay not far beyond the forest. And it was whispered—though none dared speak it aloud—that the countess looked upon this Ludwig with more than common favor. They say she granted him secret meetings, and that in the darkness of her chambers they plotted what no honorable soul should contemplate.

For Adelheid had grown weary of her husband, though he was a good lord and a just one. She desired Ludwig with a passion that overmastered her reason, and she spoke to him thus: "My lord is old and slow, and you are young and swift. Take him from this world, and I shall be yours, and all that is his shall become ours."

And Ludwig, being young and hot-blooded, listened to her words and found them sweet.

The scheme they devised was cunning. Upon a day appointed, Ludwig was to ride with his hounds through the forest near Weißenburg, winding his horn and making such a clamor as would draw the count from his house. And the countess was to goad her husband into the hunt, shaming him with sharp words if he showed reluctance.

So it was done. Count Friedrich sat that morning in his bath, taking his ease, when his wife rushed upon him in a fury. "My lord," she cried, "you sit here in idleness while the hunt rides past your very gates! Will you let your honor be trampled by these Thuringian hounds? Up, up, and show them what a Saxon lord can do!"

The count, stung by her words, rose from his bath, threw a cloak over his damp tunic, and mounted his horse without proper arms or armor. He rode forth in haste, calling out to the hunters, demanding to know who dared hunt so near his castle.

And Ludwig, who had been waiting for this very moment, turned his horse and levelled his spear. The count had no time to defend himself. The spear struck true, and Friedrich fell dead upon the forest floor, his blood staining the leaves red.

Great was the lamentation when the count's body was brought back to Weißenburg. His kinsmen wept, his vassals swore vengeance, and the monks of Goseck—where he himself had founded a monastery—prepared his body for burial. They laid him to rest in the church he had built, and set a great wooden cross upon the spot where he fell, so that all who passed might know what had been done there.

But the countess Adelheid—what did she do? She wept, as was proper, but her tears were not for her husband. She mourned the customary time, as the laws of the Church required, and when the year had passed, she took Ludwig to be her husband. The man who had killed Friedrich with his spear now sat in his seat and slept in his bed.
And she was with child.

The child was born after his father's death, a son whom Adelheid named Friedrich, after the father he would never know. He was a posthumous child, born into a world where his father lay in the grave and his mother shared the marriage-bed with the man who had put him there.

Little Friedrich grew up in the household of Ludwig the Springer—for so the Thuringian count was now called, though that name came to him later, after his famous leap from Giebichenstein. He was raised alongside Ludwig's own sons: Ludwig, who would become the first Landgrave of Thuringia; Udo, who would be a bishop; Heinrich, who died young; and Herman, who perished in captivity. And the daughters too: Konigunde, who built the monastery at Kaldenborn, and the others who married into noble houses.

Now Ludwig, having married the widow and taken her son into his house, thought to settle the matter. But the kinsmen of Friedrich would not let the crime rest. They carried their complaint to the King, crying out that Ludwig had murdered a count palatine in treachery and wedded his wife unlawfully.

And the King, being just, ordered Ludwig seized and cast into prison. They took him to Giebichenstein, that strong castle upon the high rock above the Saale, and there they bound him in chains. For two full years he languished in the dungeon, awaiting such judgment as the King might decree.

But Ludwig was a man of cunning, and he had not yet spent all his luck. He made a vow to Saint Ulrich, promising to build a church in his honor if the saint would deliver him from his captivity. And Saint Ulrich, it is said, heard his prayer and showed him a way.

Ludwig arranged with a trusty servant to bring his white horse—the one he called the Swan—to a place beneath the castle wall where the river ran deep. And he made a show of sickness, eating little, sleeping less, complaining of the cold so that his guards brought him extra garments. He piled cloak upon cloak, robe upon robe, until he was wrapped in a multitude of cloth.

And when his guards were playing at dice and paying little heed, Ludwig crept to the window of his high tower. Below, the Saale glittered in the moonlight, and there upon the bank stood his servant with the white horse.

Then Ludwig gathered himself, said a prayer to Saint Ulrich, and leaped.

It was a leap of fearful height, such as no man had ever attempted. The wind rushed past him, his garments billowing like wings, and he fell—fell—down into the cold waters of the Saale. The layers of cloth broke his fall, and he rose gasping to the surface. His servant pulled him from the river, set him upon the white horse, and they rode away before the guards could raise the alarm.

Thus did Ludwig escape death and win the name by which he is remembered to this day: Ludwig the Springer, the Leaper.

And he kept his vow. He built a church in honor of Saint Ulrich, and he caused these words to be carved in stone:

Receive, O holy Saint Ulrich,
This house from me, because you have
Released me from my fetters,
As I promised you in those hours.

But what of young Friedrich, the posthumous son? He grew to manhood in the shadow of his father's murder. The chronicles do not tell us that he feigned madness, or that he saw a ghost, or that he spoke dark words to his mother. The old tales from Saxony are not so dramatic as the plays of the English poet.

Yet the pattern is the same. A father killed. A mother married to the killer. A son who must live in that strange household, knowing what was done, waiting for his time. Young Friedrich did not need a ghost to tell him of the crime; his very name was a ghost, his face a reproach, his existence a witness.

He survived his stepfather's household, as Amleth survived the court of his uncle. He claimed his inheritance, as Hamlet could not. He became Count Palatine in his turn, bearing his father's name into the next generation, proof that murder cannot end a lineage and that the dead have a way of returning through their children.

The story of Friedrich, born after his father's murder, traveled far from Saxony. It was told and retold, shaped and reshaped, until it reached the ears of a Danish chronicler named Saxo Grammaticus, who set it down in his history of the Danes. From him it passed to French retellings, and from them to the English stage, where it found its final and most famous form in the play of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
But that is another tale, and for another telling. Here in Saxony, in the old lands of Thuringia, the stones and crosses still bear witness to the truth: that a count palatine was murdered, that his widow married his killer, and that a son was born to carry forward the name and the grievance into a world that had tried to forget them.

At Weißenburg, where the cross still stands—though the wooden one is long gone and the stone one bears a later inscription—the traveler may pause and remember Friedrich. At Goseck, where the monastery still stands, his bones lie at peace. At Reinhardsbrunn, where Ludwig's descendants built their own monastery and wrote their own version of events, the story was preserved in the chronicles that have come down to us.

And if you listen closely, on a quiet evening when the wind blows through the ruins of Weißenburg, you can almost hear the echo of that old tale: the hunt, the spear, the fall, the leap, and the child who grew up carrying the weight of his father's murder.

Thus ends the legend of Friedrich, born after his father's murder, the Hamlet of Weissenburg.