Rupert was King of Germany for a decade at the start of the 15th Century.

He was born on May 5, 1352 in Amberg, in Upper Palatinate. His father was Rupert II, Elector Palatine, and his mother was Beatrice of Aragon. He grew in a monastery near Worms, in the company of his grandmother Irmengarde of Oettingen.

Rupert assisted his father in governing the Electoral Palatinate and assumed the title in 1398, when his father died. This was a powerful position, as demonstrated by Rupert's being one of a select group of political and church leaders who deposed King Wenceslaus IV in 1400. That happened on August 20 of that year; on the very next day, the same grew of powerful people voted to elect Rupert as King of Germany. He was crowned on Jan. 6, 1401, in Cologne.

Wenceslaus did not contest his crown, but his family, the powerful House of Luxembourg, did. Rupert had his hands full hanging onto his reign. Attempting to gain prestige and the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, he led army into northern Italy in 1401; there, he found defeat and returned to Germany.

Rupert had married Elisabeth of Hohenzollern in 1374. By the time that Rupert was king, they had had nine children, all of whom lived into adulthood: Rupert (1375), Margaret (1376), Frederick (1377), Louis (1378), Agnes (1379), Elisabeth (1381), John (1383), Stephen (1385), and Otto (1390). Rupert strengthened his political hand by arranging the marriage of his son Louis to Blanche of Lancaster, whose father was England's Henry IV.

Rupert had declared his support for the Roman popes during the Great Schism, and this controversy dominated the other events of his reign. He was involved in such negotiations when he died, on May 18, 1410, near Oppenheim.