Livonian Crusade & Teutonic Order State

Crusader principalities and the Templar, Hospitaller, Teutonic and Livonian orders.

1 chapter

800 - 1209

The Varangian trade route from Scandinavia to Byzantium ran straight through Latgale along the Daugava River, carrying amber, furs, and silver between two continents. Latgalian principalities — Jersika, Koknese, and smaller hillfort polities — controlled this riverine wealth from fortified ramparts above the water. These were organized states with rulers, taxes, and alliances: Jersika's Vissevalds married into the Polotsk dynasty and negotiated with both Varangian traders and crusading bishops. The pre-Christian ritual year of these Latgalian communities is encoded in the bolsi system of folk song classification — kuozu bolss (wedding voice), rudzu bolss (rye harvest voice, linked to the deity Jumis), pavasara bolss (spring voice) — a taxonomy that survived every later political disruption. Climb the Jersika hillfort and look down at the Daugava: the river bends are unchanged, and the agricultural rhythms those songs encoded still shape Latgale's festival calendar beneath all the Catholic and Soviet overlays.

1561 - 1772

When the Livonian Order collapsed in 1561, Latgale was absorbed into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as the Inflanty Voivodeship — a multi-ethnic frontier where Polish was the prestige administrative language but Latgalian remained the spoken tongue of the peasantry. This 211-year separation from the rest of Latvian territory is the crucible of Latgale's distinctiveness. The Counter-Reformation arrived through Jesuits (college and church founded in Daugavpils, 1626) and Dominicans (monastery at Aglona, 1699), who deliberately overlaid Catholic sacred geography onto pre-Christian ritual sites — the Aglona healing spring (svētavots) became a Marian shrine, the Office of the Dead (mirušo lūgšana) replaced ancestor worship, May Devotion replaced spring fertility rites. This was not accidental syncretism but strategic substitution, creating a Baltic-Catholic synthesis that still structures Latgale's festival year. The Catholic seminary at Krāslava (1757-1842) and the enshrined relics of Saint Donatus at St. Ludvig Church created a networked sacred landscape that has been maintained for over 300 years. Old Believer communities, fleeing Nikonian reforms in 17th-century Russia, settled here alongside the Catholic majority — adding a parallel liturgical calendar that persists to this day.

1772 - 1904

The First Partition of Poland in 1772 transferred the Inflanty Voivodeship to the Russian Empire, folding Latgale into Vitebsk Governorate — severing it from the Polish-Lithuanian world that had shaped its Catholic identity and connecting it instead to an empire that treated Latgalian as a dialect to be suppressed. The 1865 printing ban, triggered by the January Uprising, forbade Latin-script publications in Latgalian — a prohibition that was simultaneously anti-Polish (punishing Uprising participants) and anti-Latgalian (creating a 40-year gap in literary production unmatched in other Latvian regions). Yet this era also brought the railway (1860, St. Petersburg-Warsaw line through Daugavpils and Rēzekne), aristocratic estate culture (the Plater and Borch families' palaces at Krāslava and Preiļi), and the construction of Daugavpils Fortress (begun 1810) — Russia's answer to Napoleon on the Latgale frontier. Church Hill in Daugavpils, where four churches of four denominations stand side by side (Lutheran 1893, Catholic 1902, Orthodox 1905, Baptist 1908), is the most vivid expression of the multi-confessional reality that neither the Polish kings nor the Russian Tsars could flatten. The Latgalian language survived the ban through oral tradition and handwritten calendars (Andryvs Jūrdžis), but the 40-year literary gap fundamentally shaped the region's cultural development differently from other Latvian regions.

1904 - 1917

When the 1865 printing ban was lifted in 1904, Latgalian cultural production exploded — newspapers, books, societies, and a renewed sense of distinct identity emerged after 40 years of silence. Francis Trasuns, elected to the Russian State Duma in 1906, became the movement's political voice. This awakening paralleled Lithuanian and Estonian national revivals across the empire's western borderlands, but Latgale's was shaped by a unique question: whether to remain separate or unite with other Latvian lands from which it had been divided since 1561. The First Latgale Congress, held 9-10 May 1917 at the cinema 'Diana' and Atbrīvošanas aleja 56 in Rēzekne, answered with a deliberate act of self-determination — a community that had been separated for three centuries chose union. This was not a natural reunion but a conscious political decision by a people whose Catholic faith, Latgalian language, and separate historical experience made them culturally distinct from the Lutheran, Germanically-influenced regions of Kurzeme and Vidzeme. The Congress site and the Latgale Culture and History Museum's collection of awakening-era publications let you read the arguments that Latgalians made for and against their own unification.