| Chapter 1: | A Brief Account of Formative Historical Events That Shaped Social and Agrarian Relations Until the Mid-Eighteenth Century in Livonia |
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The initial fortified stone building had been built in 1185 at Uexkull but, due to strategic considerations, was deemed to be too far up river. The bishop of Bremen, Albert von Buxhoevden, began construction of the Riga Castle in 1201 on the north bank of the Daugava River in order to guarantee a well-fortified and defensible base of crusading operations into the interior of Latvia. The crusading territories subjugated by German crusading orders came to be known as Livonia, a name initially associated with the coastal-dwelling, Finno-Ugric—speaking Livs occupying the area where the Riga Castle was constructed.
To a certain extent, one can interpret the history of Livonia in terms of the rise and fall of the great northern- and middle-European powers, a long process in which the subjugation and suffering of the indigenous populations was disregarded and ignored in the historical record. Due to the incomplete nature of the German missionary and colonizing process of the thirteenth century,45 the indigenous populations retained their own linguistic and distinctive cultural identities over a seven hundred-year period of foreign domination.
Latvian—along with Lithuanian—is one of the surviving Baltic languages belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. The term latvietis/latviete (“Latvian”) is a Baltic word identifying the modern Latvian-speaking inhabitant of Latvia. On the basis of their language, and due to millennia of continued settlement in this region of Europe, the indigenous populations of modern-day Latvia—Lithuania and Estonia (although not on the categorization of the Estonian language)—are labeled and described as “Baltic.” The northwestern region of present-day Belorussia was occupied by Baltic-speaking Indo-European tribes in the twelfth century. Present-day Latvia in the thirteenth century was settled by a mixture of Latvian tribes—which also included Livs’ and Estonians’ settlements among them. The Livs were settled along stretches of the coast in the Gulf of Riga and in the coastal hinterland in northwestern Latvia, which, in the Middle Ages, comprised coastal areas in Livonia and—to a lesser extent—Kurland.