Who ruled Riga?

Riga lies near the mouth of the Daugava River on the Gulf of Riga, where the main river route from the Baltic into the lands of the Rus' reached the sea. German merchants and crusaders founded the city in 1201 to control that trade and to conquer the surrounding Baltic and Finnic peoples, and for seven centuries a German-speaking elite dominated it. Its history is one of a wealthy trading port fought over by its neighbours, Poland-Lithuania, Sweden and Russia, before it became the capital of an independent Latvia in the twentieth century.

Before the Germans arrived, Livonian (Liv) fishing and trading villages stood along the Daugava, and Scandinavian, Slavic and German traders visited the river. In the late twelfth century German missionaries began work among the Livs, and in 1201 Albert, bishop of Livonia, moved his seat to the site of Riga and founded a fortified town, backed by crusaders from northern Germany. The next year he helped create the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, a military order that conquered much of what is now Latvia and Estonia. Its successor, the Livonian Order, became a branch of the Teutonic Knights. Riga was formally linked to the Holy Roman Empire, its cathedral was begun in 1211, and the town joined the Hanseatic League in 1282, exporting furs, wax, grain and timber from Russia and the Baltic interior. For centuries the city's merchants, its archbishop and the Livonian Order fought each other for control.

Riga accepted the Lutheran Reformation in the 1520s. When Livonia collapsed during the Livonian War, the city remained a free imperial city for twenty years before submitting to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1581. Gustavus Adolphus captured it for Sweden in 1621, and under Swedish rule it was one of the richest cities of the Swedish realm and a vital source of customs revenue. In the Great Northern War, the armies of Peter the Great besieged Riga, and plague raged in the city before it surrendered in July 1710. The Treaty of Nystad confirmed Russian rule in 1721, though the Baltic German nobility and burghers kept their privileges and their language.

Under the Russian Empire, and especially after the railway age began, Riga became one of the empire's great industrial cities and ports. Its population rose from about 100,000 in 1867 to more than 500,000 by 1913, and new districts were built in a flamboyant Art Nouveau style, much of it designed by Mikhail Eisenstein and other architects. Latvians, many of them newly arrived from the countryside, became the largest group in the city, and Riga grew into the centre of the Latvian national movement.

The First World War emptied the city of much of its population and industry; German troops took Riga in 1917. Latvia declared independence there on 18 November 1918, and after a war against Bolshevik and German forces, the republic was secured by 1920. The Soviet Union occupied Latvia in June 1940, deporting thousands of people. Nazi Germany followed in 1941 and murdered almost all of Riga's Jewish community, most of them in the Rumbula forest in late 1941, during the Holocaust. The Red Army returned in October 1944. Under Soviet rule large-scale migration from other republics turned Latvians into a minority in their capital. In January 1991 residents built barricades to protect government buildings from Soviet forces, and independence was restored in August 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed. Riga today is the capital of Latvia, a member of the European Union since 2004, and with about 600,000 people is the largest city in the Baltic states.