Liv

The Livs are a Finnic fishing and trading people who gave Livonia its name. They held the shores of the Gulf of Riga and the lower Daugava, with another group on the northern coast of Courland.

The Livs resisted the missions begun in the 1180s; Albert of Buxhövden founded Riga at the Daugava mouth in 1201. The Brothers of the Sword, formed in 1202, subdued and baptised them by 1208, and Liv levies fought the Order's wars as infantry.

The crusade depopulated the Daugava valley, and from about 1220 Latvian tribes moved in, separating the inland Livs from those of Courland; the inland communities were absorbed into the Latvians, while the Courland coast kept its Finnic speech. After the Livonian War the country passed through Polish and Swedish rule to Russia in 1710, and surviving Livs lived on as fishermen in the coastal villages of Courland.