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In early modern times, the countries of northern Europe specialized in supplying raw materials to Western Europe, developing an efficient port network in the process. On the south coast of the Baltic Sea, the geographical constraints favored certain port complexes located at the mouths of big rivers that collected the raw materials of their hinterland for exportation. In most of them (Danzig, Königsberg, Riga, and Memel), the municipal authorities retained their privileges, which dated from the Middle Ages, to organize their trade by establishing very strict regulations to favor the bourgeois of the city but also to facilitate the traffic of goods and to guarantee the quality of the products in the European markets. The city of Riga, founded in 1192, benefited from an exceptional geographical location that, as well as allowing it to collect goods from an immense hinterland, connected a large part of Eastern Europe with the Baltic Sea and Western Europe. It was also a hub that redistributed products and raw materials from the north to the entire European market through a well-structured trading community. The Livonian port had all the necessary assets for large-scale development: an ideal location at the mouth of the Dvina (Daugava), a river of about 1000 km in length, a hinterland that extended from Livonia to Ukraine, and an institutional context that favored international trade. The organization of the port of Riga provided a means of operating the strategic tools that these ports were, indispensable levers for economic and social development but also for the political influence of a region or a country.