Baltic German

The Baltic Germans are the German-speaking community that grew up in Livonia through the Northern Crusades and the Ostsiedlung. After the Brothers of the Sword and the Teutonic Order conquered the Estonian, Liv and Latvian lands, German settlers filled the new towns, whose guilds largely excluded the native population.

Hanseatic trade made Riga and Reval wealthy, Low German became the language of government and commerce, and a land-owning Baltic nobility ruled Estonian and Latvian serfs. Livonia turned Lutheran in the Reformation, and when the Livonian War dissolved Terra Mariana in 1561, the last Livonian master Gotthard Kettler founded the Duchy of Courland; Swedish rule brought the University of Dorpat in 1632.

Russia conquered the provinces by 1710, and the Treaty of Nystad in 1721 confirmed the nobles' privileges: the Baltic Germans ran their own Landtags and kept their cities and schools German long after the crown passed to Saint Petersburg.