Expanding Communities: Henry of Livonia on the Making of a Christian Colony, Early Thirteenth Century

Summary

In 1839, the Baltic-German artist Friedrich Ludwig von Maydell published the opening volume of his Fünfzig Bilder aus der Geschichte der deutschen Ostsee-Provinzen Russlands. One of the illustrations of this first Baltic history in images depicted A Biblical Play in Riga. This fine theatrical performance recalls the nineteenth-century historical dramas. Yet, the engraving is based on a passage from the Chronicon of Henry of Livonia (c. 1225-1227), which covers the crusades, mission, and colonization in today's Latvia and Estonia between the 1180s and 1227. The chronicle describes the scene in the following way:

That same winter a very elaborate play of the prophets was performed in the middle of Riga in order that the pagans might learn the rudiments of the Christian faith by an ocular demonstration. The subject of this play was most diligently explained to both converts and pagans through an interpreter. When, however, the army of Gideon fought the Philistines, the pagans began to take flight, fearing lest they be killed, but they were quietly called back. This play was like a prelude and prophecy of the future for in the same play there were wars, namely those of David, Gideon, and Herod, and there was the doctrine of the Old and New Testaments. Certainly, through the many wars that followed, the pagans were to be converted and, through the doctrine of the Old and New Testaments, they were to be told how they might attain to the true Peacemaker and eternal life.

While earlier interpretations have indeed treated the event as a theatrical play, in recent years scholars have sought to revise this understanding. Nils Holger Petersen claims that the ludus magnus ‘may have been anything from a large-scale enactment of biblical wars and fighting, combined with an exhortation to remind pagans of the urgency of their conversion, to a more traditional Latin sung play text of a more or less liturgically informed kind […]. Whatever the case, it seems that, for his description, Henry chose to justify the violent conversion of the pagans in the Baltic by using Old Testament models’. Although some contemporary plays show analogies with Henry's description and allow for fitting it into the broad context of religious enactments around 1200, any discussion about the precise details of the ludus magnus is strictly speculative.