Hugh Capet (; ; 940 – 24 October 996) was the King of the Franks from 987 to 996. He is the founder of and first king from the House of Capet. The son of the powerful duke Hugh the Great and his wife Hedwige of Saxony, he was elected as the successor of the last Carolingian king, Louis V. Hugh was descended from Charlemagne's son Pepin of Italy through his mother and paternal grandmother, respectively, and was also a nephew of Otto the Great.
The dynasty he founded ruled France for nearly nine centuries: from 987 to 1328 in the senior line, and until 1848 via cadet branches (with an interruption from 1792 to 1814).
Descent and inheritance
Hugh was the son of Hugh the Great, Duke of the Franks, and Hedwige of Saxony, daughter of the German king Henry the Fowler. His birth date is not given by any source, but modern scholars often date his birth between 938 and 941. He was born into a well-connected and powerful family with many ties to the royal houses of France and Germany.
Through his mother, Hugh was the nephew of Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor; Henry I, Duke of Bavaria; Bruno the Great, Archbishop of Cologne; and finally, Gerberga of Saxony, Queen of France. Gerberga was the wife of Louis IV, King of France and mother of Lothair of France and Charles, Duke of Lower Lorraine.
His paternal family, the Robertians, were powerful landowners in the Île-de-France. His grandfather had been King Robert I. King Odo was his granduncle and Emma of France, the wife of King Rudolph, was his aunt. Hugh's paternal grandmother Beatrice of Vermandois was a patrilineal descendant of Charlemagne.
Rise of the Robertians
After the end of the ninth century, the descendants of Robert the Strong became indispensable in carrying out royal policies. As Carolingian power failed, the great nobles of West Francia began to assert that the monarchy was elective, not hereditary, and twice chose Robertians (Odo I (888–898) and Robert I (922–923)) as kings, instead of Carolingians.
Robert I, Hugh the Great's father, was succeeded as King of the Franks by his son-in-law, Rudolph of Burgundy. When Rudolph died in 936, Hugh the Great had to decide whether he ought to claim the throne for himself. To claim the throne would require him to risk an election, which he would have to contest with the powerful Herbert II, Count of Vermandois, father of Hugh, Archbishop of Reims, and allied to Henry the Fowler, King of Germany; and with Hugh the Black, Duke of Burgundy, brother of the late king. To block his rivals, Hugh the Great brought Louis d'Outremer, the dispossessed son of Charles the Simple, from his exile at the court of Athelstan of England to become king as Louis IV.
This maneuver allowed Hugh to become the most powerful person in France in the first half of the tenth century. Once in power, Louis IV granted him the title of dux Francorum ("Duke of the Franks"). Louis also (perhaps under pressure) officially declared Hugh "the second after us in all our kingdoms". Hugh also gained power when Herbert II of Vermandois died in 943, because Herbert's powerful principality was then divided among his four sons.
Hugh the Great came to dominate a wide swath of central France, from Orléans and Senlis to Auxerre and Sens, while the king was rather confined to the area northeast of Paris (Compiègne, Laon, Soissons).
French monarchy in the 10th century
The realm in which Hugh grew up, and of which he would one day be king, bore little resemblance to modern France. Hugh's predecessors did not call themselves kings of France, and that title was not used by his successors until the time of his descendant Philip II. Kings ruled as rex Francorum ("King of the Franks"), the title remaining in use until 1190 (but note the use of FRANCORUM REX by Louis XII in 1499, by Francis I in 1515, and by Henry II about 1550, and on French coins up to the eighteenth century.) The lands they ruled comprised only a small part of the former Carolingian Empire. The eastern Frankish lands, the Holy Roman Empire, were ruled by the Ottonian dynasty, represented by Hugh's first cousin Otto II and then by Otto's son, Otto III. The lands south of the river Loire had largely ceased to be part of the West Francia kingdom in the years after Charles the Simple was deposed in 922. Both the Duchy of Normandy and the Duchy of Burgundy were largely independent, and Brittany entirely soalthough from 956 Burgundy was ruled by Hugh's brothers Otto and Henry.