Śladami Gustawa Manteuffla. Archiwum powiatu piltyńskiego w Rydze

The 450th anniversary of the union of Livonia with Poland and Lithuania, which was celebrated in 2011, was a good opportunity to recall that the Livonian territories being a part of Poland, were not an adminitrative unity; these were different units of different status. This is pictured in created at that territory source material and preserved archives. This text is devoted the archives of Piltene district (Districtus Regii Piltensis), that of the late 16th c. to 1795, was in connection with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but which history is relatively unknown. History of the Piltene district is an interesting picture of internal relations within the Polish-Lithuanian state. Similarly, history of the archive, which was the first time in Polish historical literature described by Gustav Manteuffel in 1884, is an interesting example of the fate of archival collections in the Central Europe over the past two centuries. Than it turned out in the 80s of 20th century that this archive is largely preserved in the Latvian State Historical Archives in Riga. The considerations in this article refer to the query performed in the archives of the Piltene district in connection with the preparation of monograph of the Piltene dietine (sejmik) from the years 1617-1717 that was published in 2004.