Common legends tells that the chastity cuff was invented during the crusades: you all know the story, the knights went to free the holy land and to extinguish all the pagans, muslims and jews, while their wives usually had to stay at home. So man and wive were seperated for a long time, often for years, and of course the wives doubted wether their men were able to be true for such a long time. "I know you", they said, "you will meet one of those nice sarazenian girls and forget me". So they forced their husbands to wear a chastity cuff. So far the legend.

In fact, the first chastity devices were invented in the times of the renaissance, in some of the italian renaissance towns. The earliest known passage referring to this subject is in a book "Bellifortis" finished on the 28th August 1405 by Konrad Kyeser von Eichstätt. It has a picture commented "Dies ist ein harteiserner Gürtel florentinischer Männer, der vorn so geschlossen wird" ("This is a hard iron belt of men of Florence closed like this"). There are some other passages mentioning other italian cities like Rome or Venice or Milano or Bergamo as places where chastity belts and cuffs were manufacted. The Museé de Cluny in Paris contains a chastity belt wich is said to be worn by King Henry the Second (of France), married to Catharina of Medici – they lifed in the sixteenth century.
The first serious discussion of enforced chastity of men is by far older: the ancient greek writer Aristophanes wrote a comedy, "Lysistrate", about this subject: how the women deny their husbands intercourse and force them by this mean to end the war between Sparta and Athen. He describes the consequences of enforced chastity; one husbands says:

O me! these pangs and paroxysms of love,
Riving my heart, keen as a torturer's wheel
. . .
She looks, methinks, more youthful than she did,
More gentle-loving, and more sweet by far.
Her very airs, her petulant, saucy ways,
They do but make me love her, love her more.
[Aristophanes, The Lysistrata, l. 845-888]

In victorian times, the focus of interest shifted to the prevention of masturbation. It was soon quite clear that enforced chastity could only be an aid for woman to reign their men if it did include the prevention of masturbation, not only the negation of sexual intercourse between different sexes, because only the constant state of being aroused could force men to cooperate. With the fast increasement of science and art, practicabel, long-term wearable, unbreakable devices could be produced at least at the end of the nineteenth century. From that moment on, chastity devices for men became very common in western society.
Nowadays, only few people could imagine a modern culture without chastity cuffs. Many women set their husbands or boy-friends free only for the short span of intercourse, others release their men never at all, getting eventually pregnant if they want to by some drippings of sperm omitted without orgasm by their men.