Polish-Lithuanian Inflanty & Catholic Counter-Reformation

The Jagiellonian commonwealth, its multi-confessional frontier and the Partitions.

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1209 - 1561

The Northern Crusades reached Latgale in 1209 when crusading forces subjugated the Latgalian principalities. Jersika fell; Koknese fell; the autonomous Latgalian rulers were replaced by the Livonian Order's stone castles — Ludza (1399) and Rositten/Rēzekne (1285) — built to hold the eastern frontier against Pskov, Novgorod, and Lithuania. Walk the castle ruins today and read the military logic: hilltop sites between lakes, commanding the river valleys and trade routes that had made Latgale worth conquering. Under the Teutonic Order state, the Latgalian-speaking population became serfs on crusader estates, their pre-Christian agricultural rituals persisting beneath a thin veneer of enforced Catholicism. The Order's administrative borders split Latgale from the rest of Latvian territory — a separation that would last three centuries and fundamentally shape the region's cultural distinctiveness. These castle ruins are the sharpest physical traces of the era; the broken walls explain why every later power found Latgale so strategic.

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.

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.

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.