The Order had retaliated against the Balts in Livonia by 1272, attacking Semigalia and building Dinaburga Castle in 1273 on lands in Latgalia, nominally controlled by Traidenis.

The Brothers of the Sword, a branch of the Teutonic Knights, had in the 1270s founded the fortress of Dünaburg along the Dvina River, twelve miles (nineteen kilometers) above the modern site of Daugavpils.

The fortress and adjoining town had been destroyed, and then refounded on the present location by Ivan the Terrible during the Livonian wars in the 1570s.

The end of the Livonian wars sees Dünaburg in Polish possession, its fortress rebuilt and strengthened in 1582.

Another Swedish expedition, numbering around four thousand and led by Count Frederick Joachim Mansfeld, had landed near Riga several days later and besieged the fortress of Dünamünde (Daugavgriva, Dynemunt), although without any success.

After this setback, ...

Mansfeld captures Daugavgriva, ...

Charles X Gustav has at his disposal fifty thousand men and fifty warships to deploy when Sweden declares war against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Hostilities in what is to become the Second (or Little) Northern War had begun on July 1, 1655, when Swedish forces entered Poland-Lithuania from Swedish Pomerania in the west, and Livonia in the north.

The division on the northern flank consists of seventy-two hundred men commanded by Magnus de la Gardie, who uses them to seize Dünaburg on July 12.