The House of Hemp and Butter

Founded as an ecclesiastical center, trading hub, and intended capital of a feudal state, Riga was Old Livonia's greatest city and its indispensable port. Because the city was situated in what was initially remote and inhospitable territory, surrounded by pagans and coveted by regional powers like Poland, Sweden, and Muscovy, it was also a fortress encased by a wall.

The House of Hemp and Butter begins in the twelfth century with the arrival to the eastern Baltic of German priests, traders, and knights, who conquered and converted the indigenous tribes and assumed mastery over their lands. It ends in 1710 with an account of the greatest war Livonia had ever seen, one that was accompanied by mass starvation, a terrible epidemic, and a flood of nearly biblical proportions that devastated the city and left its survivors in misery.

Readers will learn about Riga's people—merchants and clerics, craftsmen and builders, porters and day laborers—about its structures and spaces, its internal conflicts and its unrelenting struggle to maintain its independence against outside threats. The House of Hemp and Butter is an indispensable guide to a quintessentially European city located in one of the continent's more remote corners.

Kevin C. O'Connor is Professor of History at Gonzaga University. He is author of a number of books, including, The History of the Baltic States, Culture and Customs of the Baltic States, and Intellectuals and Apparatchiks.

The House of Hemp and Butter is an impeccably-researched and very engagingly written account of Riga's fascinating social, economic, and political history.

... careful research is combined with a lively and colourful style.... This vivid and readable account is an excellent concise exposition of the early history of a great city.

O'Connor's book is a portrait of a city that is no more, a city whose citizens and guests redefined themselves many times, but not along the lines that today's Rigans would recognize. While the author reminds us that the past is a foreign country, he all the same encourages the reader to see societies as ever-changing entities, exposing the claims to Europe's historical homogeneity as myths built on faulty foundations.

Andrejs Plakans, Professor Emeritus, Iowa State University, author of A Concise History of the Baltic States:

O'Connor has an attractive and highly readable writing style and his account has no 'national' axe to grind and thus strikes a fair balance between the relative significance of the various nationalities that populated the city in the 500-year period he surveys. For tourists planning to visit the city, he explains how contemporary physical features—location, suburbs, churches, street names in the medieval part of the city—are in part linked to the events of these early centuries.