Latvia

From the Baltic tribes and the Northern Crusades to a republic twice declared free.

Latvia's history is shaped by its position on the eastern Baltic shore, a meeting point of Baltic and Finnic peoples, German crusaders, and the great powers that ringed the sea. In the thirteenth century the Northern Crusades brought German bishops and military orders who founded Riga in 1201 and forged the church-state of Terra Mariana, binding the Latvian and Livonian tribes to Latin Christendom. For centuries the land and its great Hanseatic port passed between rulers, the Livonian Order, Poland-Lithuania, Sweden, the Duchy of Courland and, from the early eighteenth century, the Russian Empire, while a Baltic German nobility dominated the countryside. A national awakening in the nineteenth century gave the Latvian people a modern sense of nationhood, and on 18 November 1918 an independent Republic of Latvia was proclaimed, its sovereignty recognised by Soviet Russia in the Treaty of Riga of 1920. That independence was extinguished in 1940 when the Soviet Union, acting under its secret pact with Nazi Germany, occupied and annexed the country, an act the Western powers never recognised; occupation, deportation, the Holocaust and decades of Soviet rule followed. Sustained by the doctrine of state continuity and by mass movements such as the Baltic Way, Latvians declared the restoration of independence in 1990, achieved it fully in 1991, and anchored the renewed state in the European Union and NATO in 2004.