As members of the Adelsaristocratie, the Hucpoldings were connected to the Carolingian dynasty at the highest level. The first known member of the kindred group, Hucpold, was associated with Lothar I (817/840–855) and came to Italy with the Frankish army. There he set about to establish his kindred through political and matrimonial alliances.

Spreading their political and patrimonial horizons was a common practice of Frankish aristocracies in the Carolingian period. Nonetheless, the case of Hucpold and of his kindred can be almost totally linked to the Italian territory. They even had the admiration of Liutprand of Cremona, who depicts Hucpold's son, Hubald, as defender of Italian pride against Bavarian invaders in the last decades of the ninth century. The fragmentary sources that survive to this day allow us, however, to identify the region, which corresponds to Roman Alamannia (now Switzerland and adjacent parts of France and Germany) as both the origin of Hucpold and even that of his ancestors. Furthermore, their long-standing practice of Ripuarian Frankish law permits us to retrace the origins of the kin group further back in time and to place it in the lands traversed by the Rhine where the Ripuarian Franks had already established themselves in Roman times.

The history of the Hucpoldings in Italy starts in the first half of the ninth century in the context of the military expeditions organized by Lothar I and his son, Louis II, against the ‘Saracens’.