Abstract
Riga, a major port of the eastern Baltic Sea coast, now the capital of Latvia, has had a very chequered history. Founded by German merchants, missionaries and soldiers in 1201 at the mouth of the great river Daugava/Düna/Dvina, Riga became of significance to Europe when it formed the springboard for the thirteenth-century Baltic anti-pagan crusades. It soon became the seat of an archbishopric and focus of Catholic authority for three hundred years before being overtaken by the Reformation and Lutheranism; but the Archbishop’s authority was early challenged by the Livonian Knights. From the start Riga was a port of international importance, soon a member of the Hanseatic League – its mercantile significance explains the book’s title, which the author first met in a sixteenth-century poem. At the same time Riga was a German Christian fortress outpost assailed by all the powers which successively fought for survival or influence in the much-contested eastern Baltic area: after finally subduing the pagan native Livs, Latvians and Estonians, Riga’s Baltic German rulers had to resist and then negotiate a modus vivendi with Lithuanians, Poles, Danes, Swedes and Russians before succumbing to conquest by Peter the Great’s Muscovy in 1710, with which the book ends.
Professor O’Connor fell in love with Riga on his first visit in 2002, and the book shows it: careful research is combined with a lively and colourful style which seeks to bring the city and its dramatic history and culture to life for the reader. O’Connor is linguistically at home in German, Latvian and Russian (though not, apparently, Estonian) and his bibliographical coverage is good; he contents himself with only published sources. The subject matter is made more accessible by the introductory synopsis or Chapter Overview, a useful list of Dramatis Personae, and – for those specially interested in the built environment or wishing to visit Riga – three pages on ‘Noteworthy Places and Buildings’. Eight chapters then take us from Riga’s beginnings, explained in the context of European social and economic developments; through the Northern Crusades and Riga’s Hanse period; on to the struggles for control of the city between the Archbishop, the Livonian Knights and the governing City Council; the Livonian War of Muscovy against Poland and Sweden (1558–83) which led to the dissolution of the Livonian Order and a ‘Polish interlude’ (1581–1621) of control by Poland-Lithuania; Swedish rule, seen by some as ‘the good old times’ (1621–1710); and the catastrophes of siege, plague and flood which gave Muscovite Russia final control of a starved and destroyed Riga during the Great Northern War (1700–21).
O’Connor tells his story well, using a wide focus which embraces notable individuals and the social and cultural life of the city and its people as well as providing clear background information on political and historical events. The detail of his brisk and wide-ranging narration sometimes obscures the larger historical outline, but this is an absorbing and engaging account. It is also well and carefully balanced – O’Connor is an outsider, with no national axe to grind in a field where much historiography has nationalistic emphases. One small point of contention, however, is his translation of the term undeutsch, the word used by early Baltic Germans to describe indigenous (principally Latvian, but also Liv, Finnish etc.) inhabitants of the city and area. O’Connor translates it without comment (p. 7) as ‘non-German’, which in modern German would be nichtdeutsch. In the early medieval period undeutsch seems to have been purely factual in its implication, but between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, as O’Connor himself points out (pp. 220–21), the economic and social differences between Germans and others sharpened. If any Latvians rose socially they were absorbed and became German so that the term acquired a derogatory meaning. Should undeutsch be ‘un-German’ (cf. ‘un-American’ as opposed to ‘non-American’)? The term’s meaning should at least be discussed. But this query does not detract from the book’s overall value. This vivid and readable account is an excellent concise exposition of the early history of a great city. As the author says (p. 11), ‘The history of old Riga is worth knowing. Here [he] will show you why.’