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:

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.