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Courland
The western Latvian duchy that once held colonies in Africa and the Caribbean
Courland, the western lobe of Latvia that juts into the Baltic, was for more than two centuries a small duchy with outsized ambitions. In the mid-17th century Duke Jacob Kettler built a merchant fleet and planted colonies on Tobago in the Caribbean and on an island in the Gambia River in West Africa, making Courland one of the smallest European states ever to try overseas empire. Russia annexed the duchy in 1795, but its name lives on. In Latvian it is Kurzeme, one of the country's officially recognized historical lands, a region of pine forest, amber-strewn beaches, and the old town of Kuldīga, while the ducal capital, Jelgava, lies just to the east in Zemgale.
The duchy covered about 27,300 square kilometers south and west of the Gulf of Riga, between the open Baltic and the Daugava River. It joined two lands: Courland proper in the west and Semigallia (Zemgale) in the east, around Jelgava and Bauska, whose plains are Latvia's richest farmland. The western part is low and wooded, with the Kurzeme Upland, long dune coasts, and the fishing villages of the Livonian Coast on its northern tip, where the last Liv communities lived. Liepāja and Ventspils are its largely ice-free ports. All of historic Courland lies in Latvia today, and Latvia's 2021 law on historical lands recognizes Kurzeme and Zemgale separately. Its southern neighbor is Lithuania, which received the resort of Palanga, part of Russian Courland since 1819, in 1921.
Courland emerged from the wreck of the Livonian Confederation in 1561, when Gotthard Kettler, the last master of the Livonian Order, secularized the Order's southern lands and became duke under Polish-Lithuanian sovereignty. Duke Jacob's colonies were short-lived, lost to the Dutch and English within decades, and the duchy suffered through the wars of Sweden, Poland, and Russia. In the Third Partition of Poland in 1795 Russia annexed it as the Courland Governorate, run locally by Baltic German nobles. German forces occupied it in 1915 and in 1918 backed a short-lived Duchy of Courland under German protection, but it became part of independent Latvia. In 1944 and 1945 a large German army held out in the Courland Pocket until Germany's surrender.