On the morning of 23 May 1618, a delegation of Bohemian Protestant noblemen climbed the stairs of Prague Castle, argued furiously with two Catholic imperial regents, staged an impromptu trial on the spot, and threw both men — plus their secretary, for good measure — out of a high window of the Bohemian Chancellery. The drop was around twenty metres. Astonishingly, all three survived, and the argument about why has never quite ended. What is not in dispute is the consequence: within months Europe had begun sliding into the Thirty Years' War, one of the most destructive conflicts in its history. And here is the truly remarkable part — Prague had done all this before. Two centuries separate the city's two great defenestrations, and each one detonated a continental war.
The first came on 30 July 1419. Prague was seething with the ideas of Jan Hus, the reformist preacher burned at the stake for heresy at the Council of Constance four years earlier. A radical Hussite priest named Jan Želivský led a procession to the New Town Hall to demand the release of imprisoned fellow believers; someone inside the building was said to have thrown a stone at him. The crowd stormed the hall and hurled the burgomaster and a number of councillors from the windows, and those who survived the fall were finished off by the mob below. King Wenceslas IV died within weeks — reportedly of the shock and fury — and Bohemia plunged into the Hussite Wars: some fifteen years of fighting in which five successive papal crusades were launched against the Hussites, and all five were beaten back.
The window at the castle
The 1618 sequel had the same essential grievance — religion — dressed in imperial politics. Bohemia's Protestant nobles had been guaranteed freedom of worship by the Letter of Majesty of 1609, and they believed the fiercely Catholic Habsburg heir, Ferdinand of Styria, intended to tear that guarantee up. On 23 May a party led by Count Thurn confronted two of the emperor's regents, Vilém Slavata and Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice, found them guilty of violating the Letter, and pitched them out of the window along with their secretary, Philip Fabricius. This was no spontaneous riot: the participants knew their history, and consciously imitated the events of 1419.
Then came the miracle — or the manure. All three men survived the fall. Catholic pamphleteers announced that the Virgin Mary, or a squadron of angels, had caught them in mid-air. Protestant wits countered that they had landed in a dung heap piled beneath the window. Historians treat both versions warily: the dung heap is at least as much propaganda as the angels, and a sloping ledge with soft ground below may deserve the real credit. Fabricius scrambled away to carry the news to Vienna, and was later ennobled with a title usually rendered as von Hohenfall — "of Highfall" — surely the most literal aristocratic name ever granted.
The Bohemians deposed Ferdinand and offered their crown to the Protestant Frederick V of the Palatinate, remembered as the "Winter King" because his reign barely outlasted one. His army was crushed at the Battle of White Mountain outside Prague in November 1620, twenty-seven rebel leaders were executed in the Old Town Square the following June, and Bohemia was forcibly re-Catholicised. But the war the window had started refused to stop. Denmark, Sweden, France and Spain were all drawn in, and by the time the Peace of Westphalia ended it in 1648 the fighting, and the famine and plague that marched with it, had killed millions — in parts of the German lands, a third or more of the population.
A very Czech tradition
The word itself is built from the Latin fenestra, "window", and Prague's association with it has proved grimly durable. In March 1948, weeks after the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the foreign minister Jan Masaryk — son of the country's founding president — was found dead in the courtyard beneath a bathroom window of the Czernin Palace. Suicide, said the new regime; murder, said much of the world. The case has been reinvestigated repeatedly and remains unresolved, and it is often called, half in earnest, the Third Defenestration of Prague. Few cities possess a signature method of political dispute. Prague's is the window — and twice, all of Europe fell out of it.
Quiz nuggets
- In the First Defenestration of Prague (30 July 1419), a Hussite crowd led by the priest Jan Želivský threw the burgomaster and councillors from the New Town Hall, igniting the Hussite Wars.
- In the Second Defenestration (23 May 1618), the regents Vilém Slavata and Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice survived a fall of roughly twenty metres from Prague Castle.
- Their secretary Philip Fabricius was thrown out too, and was later ennobled as von Hohenfall — "of Highfall".
- The 1618 defenestration triggered the Thirty Years' War, ended by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
- Frederick V of the Palatinate is called the "Winter King" because his Bohemian reign collapsed at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620.