Elder House of Welf

[3] Nevertheless, an early ancestor may have been the Frankish nobleman Ruthard (d. before 790), a count in the Argengau and administrator of the Carolingian king Pepin the Younger in Alamannia.

A late medieval legend first documented in 1475 referred to a (non-historical) Duke Balthazar of Swabia, whose marriage had remained childless and who represented as his own heir and successor Bundus, the newborn son of one of his hunters.

Another popular version refers to the eleven (elf) sons of one Count Isenbart of Altdorf, whose mother wanted them to be drowned and years later was faced with those among them who escaped death.

When the name first appeared in surviving documents, the family was already at the top of Francia society, with Welf, the first Count of Altdorf, the father-in-law of Emperor Louis the Pious (the son and heir of Charlemagne).

He left an only son Rudolph who assumed the royal crown at the abbey of St Maurice en Valais in 888, who confirmed his independence with two victories over Arnulf, and was then acknowledged emperor in a general diet of the empire.

His son, Rudolph II succeeded to this new-formed state, which included the French or western part of Switzerland, Franche-Comté, Savoy, Dauphiné, Provence, and the country between the Rhine and the Alps, and was known as the kingdom of Burgundy.

When Rudolph III died without legitimate issue in 1032, the Kingdom of Burgundy was inherited by his niece's husband Conrad of Swabia, who had been elected emperor in 1024.