Hugh Capet

Founder of the Capetian dynasty and the man whose election as king of the Franks in 987 ended Carolingian rule and inaugurated a royal line that would sit on the French throne for over 800 years. His real territory was almost trivial — a strip of land around Paris and Orléans — but by crowning his son Robert during his own lifetime he set the precedent of dynastic continuity that gradually transformed an elective kingship into a hereditary one.