The Livonian Confederation in 1560 was a patchwork of bishoprics and a military order that had outlived its purpose. The crusades against the Baltic pagans had ended generations earlier; the local population had been Christianized; the Order's German-speaking nobility ruled over Latvian and Estonian peasants in a system that no longer needed knights in mail. Across the eastern border, the new tsar Ivan IV — Ivan the Terrible — had decided he wanted Livonia. The Livonian War began in 1558 with Russian forces sweeping into eastern Estonia, taking Narva and Dorpat. Two years in, the Order was running out of money, manpower, and allies. Land Marshal Philipp Schall von Bell, who was also Commander of Riga, gathered what cavalry he could and set up camp near Trikāta in northern Latvia, intending to repel any new Russian advance.

When the thirty foragers stumbled onto the Russian patrol, eighteen rode back for reinforcements while twelve stayed to chase the retreating Russians. The twelve quickly discovered that the patrol had not been alone. Behind it stood the main force of Prince Vasily Barbashin, perhaps a thousand strong, possibly considerably more. Several knights died trying to disengage. The survivors raced back to Trikāta to alert von Bell. The Land Marshal made a snap calculation: about 500 Russians had been spotted, and he had 300 horsemen — enough heavy cavalry to scatter that kind of force. He ordered the charge. His knights initially trampled the Russian outpost and pursued the routing screen toward the main body. Then the trap closed. Surrounded on a meadow, weighed down by their armor in summer heat, the German cavalry was killed or captured almost to a man.

The German chronicle put the Order's losses at 261 dead, with Land Marshal von Bell and ten of his senior commanders taken prisoner. Russian losses were never recorded with precision, but the chronicle noted that it took fourteen carts to remove the Russian dead to be burned — implying that even in victory the cost had been substantial. Those who had not joined von Bell's charge fled the camp at Trikāta. The Order's field army had ceased to exist in a single afternoon. Ērģeme was the last open battle the Livonian Order would ever fight. From that day forward the Order could only defend its castles and wait for relief that would never come.

Von Bell was taken to Moscow and questioned personally by Ivan IV. The interrogation did not go well. Russian sources record that the Land Marshal answered insolently and haughtily, refusing to show deference to the tsar. Ivan ordered him executed along with his most senior commanders, including von Bell's own brother Werner, the Komtur of Goldingen. Some lower-ranking prisoners were killed; others were forced into Russian serfdom under a process the Russian sources called oholopleny — literally, being made into a peasant. The one high-ranking captive who survived was Hermann Wesel, the Bishop of Dorpat, who had been taken in 1558 and somehow held onto the tsar's favor. Wesel was permitted to bury the executed knights in Catholic rite, outside Moscow, in a quiet act of mercy that costs Ivan nothing and is therefore probably true.

Within a year of Ērģeme the Livonian Order dissolved itself. Its last master, Gotthard Kettler, transferred the Order's southern territories to himself as the Duke of Courland under Polish-Lithuanian protection. Northern Estonia handed itself to Sweden; the islands of Ösel went to Denmark. Riga negotiated its own terms. The Russians kept what they had taken. The five-hundred-year political experiment that began with German crusaders sailing into the Daugava in the twelfth century ended on a meadow near a small Latvian river in the summer of 1560. Today the village of Ērģeme is a quiet farming settlement near Valka on the Estonian border. There is no monument to the battle that ended an empire, only the fields and the woods and the memory carried in chronicles written by the people who fought there.