Durbe

Durbe lies in the flat, wooded countryside of Courland in what is now southern Kurzeme, Latvia, on the edge of the valley of the little Trumpe river beside Lake Durbe. The place is first noted in written sources in 1260, when the Battle of Durbe was fought near the lake.

On 13 July 1260 the Samogitians defeated the joint forces of the Teutonic Knights from Prussia and the Livonian Order. About 150 knights were killed, among them the Livonian master Burkhard von Hornhausen and the Prussian marshal Heinrich Botel. It was the heaviest defeat the knights suffered in the thirteenth century. The battle helped set off the Great Prussian Uprising and the revolts of the Curonians, Semigallians and Oeselians, and undid two decades of Livonian conquest; it took about thirty years for the Livonian Order to restore its control. Lake Durbe and the surrounding woods thus carry the memory of a frontier fought over between the crusading orders and the peoples of the Baltic coast.