Louis X

Two crowns came to Louis X by inheritance from each parent. The eldest son of Philip IV of France and Joan I, queen of Navarre and countess of Champagne, he became king of Navarre as Louis I on his mother's death in 1305, and king of France on his father's in 1314. The double inheritance made him the first ruler to hold France and the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre together, a union that persisted under his brothers.

His short reign opened under the shadow of scandal. In 1314 his wife, Margaret of Burgundy, daughter of Duke Robert II of Burgundy, had been convicted of adultery in the Tour de Nesle affair and imprisoned; she died in captivity in 1315. That summer Louis married Clementia of Hungary, a princess of the Angevin house that ruled Hungary and Naples, itself a cadet branch descended from the Capetians. By Margaret he had a daughter, Joan, whose contested rights would later be settled with the crown of Navarre.

Politically, Louis faced the backlash against his father's exacting government. He permitted the trial and execution of Philip IV's chief minister, Enguerrand de Marigny, in 1315, and issued a series of charters confirming the customary privileges of provincial nobilities. The same year he offered the serfs of the royal domain the chance to purchase their freedom and readmitted Jews, expelled by his father in 1306, under regulated conditions. A campaign against Flanders in 1315 bogged down in mud and achieved nothing.

Louis died suddenly at Vincennes in June 1316, reportedly after drinking chilled wine following strenuous exercise, leaving Queen Clementia pregnant. The posthumous son, John I, lived only a few days in November 1316, whereupon Louis's brother Philip secured the throne ahead of the young Joan. The episode produced the first succession crisis of the Capetian dynasty in over three centuries and the precedent, soon made doctrine, that the French crown could not pass to or through a woman.