Defenestrations of Prague

Based on Wikipedia: Defenestrations of Prague

The Art of Throwing People Out Windows

In 1618, a group of angry Protestant noblemen burst into Prague Castle, grabbed two Catholic government officials and their secretary, and hurled them out of a third-floor window. The men fell seventy feet.

They survived.

Catholics claimed the Virgin Mary herself had caught them mid-air, cushioning their fall with divine intervention. Protestants, never ones to let a good propaganda opportunity slip away, later spread a different story: the men had simply landed in a massive pile of horse dung that had accumulated in the castle moat below.

Neither explanation was likely true, but both made for excellent pamphlets. And pamphlets mattered, because that window-tossing incident would help trigger one of the most devastating wars in European history.

This was not, remarkably, the first time Praguers had resolved political disputes by throwing people out of windows. It wasn't even the second time. The practice was so distinctly associated with the Bohemian capital that we owe the English word "defenestration" to these events—from the Latin de (out of) and fenestra (window).

Why Windows?

To understand why medieval and early modern Europeans occasionally threw their enemies out of windows, you need to understand something about how political violence worked before the age of standing armies and professional police forces.

Defenestration occupied a peculiar middle ground between assassination and formal execution. It was mob violence with a veneer of collective decision-making. When a crowd threw someone from a window, no single person could be blamed for the death. Everyone participated. Everyone was complicit. This distributed the moral and legal responsibility across the entire group—making it harder for authorities to punish anyone specifically, and giving the act a quasi-legitimate character.

It was also theatrical. Public. Unmistakable in its message.

A murder in a back alley could be covered up. A body plummeting from a government building in broad daylight could not.

The First Defenestration: Religious Revolution

The story begins a century before Martin Luther nailed his famous theses to a church door in Wittenberg. In the early 1400s, Bohemia was already convulsed by religious reform.

Jan Hus was a Czech priest and academic who had grown disgusted with the corruption of the Catholic Church. He preached in Czech rather than Latin so ordinary people could understand him. He argued that the Bible, not papal authority, should be the ultimate source of religious truth. He criticized the sale of indulgences—those certificates the Church sold promising reduced time in purgatory for the buyer or their dead relatives.

In 1415, the Church burned Hus at the stake for heresy.

This did not go over well in Bohemia.

Rather than crushing the reform movement, Hus's execution created martyrdom. His followers, the Hussites, grew more numerous and more radical. They demanded changes the Church refused to grant, particularly the right of ordinary people to receive communion in "both kinds"—both the bread and the wine, rather than just the bread as Catholic practice dictated. This might seem like a trivial distinction to modern readers, but in medieval theology, it represented a profound challenge to clerical authority and the special status of priests.

By 1419, tensions in Prague had reached a breaking point.

On July 30th of that year, a Hussite priest named Jan Želivský led his congregation through the streets of Prague in a procession. They marched toward the New Town Hall, where the city council was meeting. The Hussites wanted their imprisoned brethren released. The council refused.

Then someone inside the town hall threw a stone. It struck Želivský.

Whether this was intentional provocation or nervous accident, we'll never know. But the effect was immediate. The crowd stormed the building. They seized the judge, the burgomaster (essentially the mayor), and several council members.

Out the windows they went.

None survived.

The Consequences: A Crusade

The First Defenestration transformed a religious reform movement into something more like a revolution. Pro-Hussite nobles took control of Bohemia. The Pope declared a crusade against "Wycliffites, Hussites, and all other heretics in Bohemia."

The Hussite Wars that followed would last fifteen years.

Five separate crusades would be launched against Bohemia. All five would fail. The Hussites, despite being vastly outnumbered and facing the combined forces of Catholic Europe, developed innovative military tactics—including the famous war wagons, mobile fortifications that could be arranged into defensive formations. Their commander, Jan Žižka, never lost a battle despite being blind in one eye and, later, both eyes.

When the fighting finally ended in 1436, the Hussites had won significant religious concessions. Bohemia became a peculiar anomaly in medieval Europe: a kingdom where significant Protestant practices were tolerated a full century before the Reformation proper.

The Forgotten Middle Defenestration

The second defenestration, in 1483, is often overlooked entirely. Some historians don't even count it when numbering the Prague defenestrations, which creates confusion when people refer to the famous 1618 incident as either the "second" or "third" depending on whether they're acknowledging this middle event.

By the 1480s, Bohemia had a new king, Vladislaus II of Hungary, who was Catholic. The Hussite party—specifically those who practiced communion under both kinds, called Utraquists from the Latin utraque meaning "both"—feared their hard-won religious freedoms were slipping away.

On September 24, 1483, the Utraquists struck first.

They launched coordinated coups across Prague's Old Town, New Town, and the Malá Strana district. The Old Town burgomaster was thrown from a window. Seven New Town councilors followed—though several were already dead before they went out the windows, their bodies defenestrated posthumously to make a point.

The violence worked. Within weeks, Prague's three municipalities signed a treaty establishing Utraquist dominance. Two years later, at the Assembly of Kutná Hora, Bohemia officially declared equality between Catholic and Utraquist churches.

Religious peace would prevail for thirty-one years.

Setting the Stage for War

To understand the Third Defenestration, we need to understand the religious settlement that governed the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth century.

In 1555, the Peace of Augsburg established a principle with a Latin name: Cuius regio, eius religio. Whose realm, his religion. Each prince could determine whether his territory would be Catholic or Lutheran. Subjects who disagreed could emigrate, but while they lived under a prince's rule, they had to conform to his faith.

Bohemia, governed by the Catholic Habsburg dynasty since 1526, was a special case. The Habsburgs had mostly left their predominantly Protestant subjects alone. In 1609, Rudolf II—who was both Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia—went even further. He issued the Letter of Majesty, which guaranteed Protestants the right to freely practice their religion. The Protestant estates could even build their own churches.

This created, in effect, a Protestant state church within Catholic-ruled Bohemia, controlled by the Protestant nobility and towns rather than by the king.

Then Rudolf died.

His successor, Matthias, initially continued the policy of tolerance. But Matthias was aging and childless. When he designated his cousin Ferdinand of Styria as his heir—and had him elected King of Bohemia in 1617—the religious balance shifted dramatically.

Ferdinand was a zealous Catholic, a champion of the Counter-Reformation, the movement within the Catholic Church that sought to reverse Protestant gains across Europe. He was not the kind of man inclined to honor his predecessor's concessions to heretics.

The Breaking Point

The immediate trigger was a dispute over church construction.

The Letter of Majesty guaranteed Protestants the right to build churches. But did this right extend to royal lands—territory directly owned by the king rather than by Protestant nobles or self-governing towns? Protestants said yes. Ferdinand said no.

In 1618, Ferdinand ordered construction halted on several Protestant chapels being built on royal land. When the Bohemian estates protested, he dissolved their assembly.

This was not merely a religious dispute. It was a constitutional crisis. The Protestant estates believed their fundamental rights were being revoked. The king believed he was simply enforcing the proper limits of those rights on his own property.

Both sides were absolutely convinced they were correct.

The Morning of May 23, 1618

At 8:30 in the morning, four Catholic regents—essentially royal governors—arrived at the Bohemian Chancellery in Prague Castle. They were Count Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice, Count Vilém Slavata of Chlum, Adam II von Sternberg (the supreme burgrave), and Matthew Leopold Popel Lobkowitz (the grand prior).

Half an hour later, members of the dissolved Protestant assembly gathered. Their leader was Count Thurn, who had a personal grievance: the Emperor had stripped him of his position as castellan of Karlštejn Castle.

The Protestant lords had a specific agenda. They wanted to know which of the four regents had advised the Emperor to crack down on Protestant church construction. They had a letter in which the Emperor declared their "lives and honor already forfeit"—threatening, in effect, their execution for treason.

Count Martinice later recorded what happened next. The Protestants read aloud their grievances and demanded to know which regents had recommended the harsh letter.

The regents requested time. Let us consult with our superior, they said. Give us until Friday to provide an official response. (The encounter took place on the eve of Ascension Day, a religious holiday that everyone had to observe.)

The Protestants refused to wait.

Judgment

What followed was a strange sort of tribunal.

Two of the regents, Sternberg and Lobkowitz, were declared innocent. The Protestant lords judged them too pious, too moderate, to have pushed for the Emperor's threatening letter. They were escorted from the room. On his way out, Sternberg made clear that he had not advised anything "contrary to the Letter of Majesty."

That left Martinice and Slavata—both known as Catholic hard-liners—and Philip Fabricius, the secretary. When pressed, they acknowledged responsibility for the letter.

They assumed they would be arrested.

Count Thurn turned to address them directly:

You are enemies of us and of our religion, have desired to deprive us of our Letter of Majesty, have horribly plagued your Protestant subjects, and have tried to force them to adopt your religion against their wills or have had them expelled for this reason.

Then he addressed the crowd:

Were we to keep these men alive, then we would lose the Letter of Majesty and our religion, for there can be no justice to be gained from or by them.

Shortly thereafter, Martinice, Slavata, and Fabricius were seized and hurled from the window.

The Fall

The window was on the third floor, seventy feet above the ground.

All three survived.

This posed an interesting theological problem for both sides. The Catholics needed to explain how three men could fall seventy feet and live without divine intervention. The Protestants needed to explain how God could permit such obvious villains to escape judgment.

Catholic pamphleteers settled on miraculous intervention—the Virgin Mary catching the men in her arms, or angels cushioning their fall. Protestant propagandists countered with the dung heap story, claiming the men had simply landed in the accumulated manure of the castle moat.

Modern historians have noted that the dung heap story appears nowhere in contemporary accounts. It seems to have been invented later, specifically to counter Catholic claims of divine protection.

The truth is probably mundane. The slope beneath the window was steep, and the men likely tumbled down the embankment rather than falling straight down. They were also wearing heavy clothing. And they were lucky.

Philip Fabricius, the secretary, was later ennobled by the Emperor with the title "Baron von Hohenfall"—Baron of High Fall. Someone in the Habsburg bureaucracy had a sense of humor.

The War Begins

Immediately after the defenestration, both sides began preparing for war.

The Protestant estates seized control of Bohemia. When Emperor Matthias died in 1619, they refused to recognize his heir, Ferdinand II, as their king. Instead, they offered the Bohemian crown to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine—a leading Calvinist prince and, importantly, the son-in-law of James I of England and Scotland.

This turned out to be a catastrophic miscalculation.

By deposing a legitimately chosen king (whatever his flaws), the Bohemian Protestants made it impossible to gain international support. Other Protestant powers might sympathize with their religious grievances, but they couldn't endorse the principle that subjects could simply un-king an anointed monarch whenever they disagreed with him. That principle threatened every throne in Europe.

Frederick V would be mocked as the "Winter King"—his reign lasted barely one winter.

The Battle of White Mountain

On November 8, 1620, less than two years after the defenestration, Catholic and Protestant forces met at Bílá Hora—the White Mountain—just outside Prague.

The battle lasted two hours.

The Protestant army collapsed. Frederick fled. The Catholic Habsburgs retook Bohemia.

What followed was brutal. Prague was plundered for weeks. Several months later, twenty-seven Protestant nobles and citizens were publicly tortured and executed in the Old Town Square. Twelve of their heads were impaled on iron hooks and hung from the Old Town Bridge Tower, where they remained for ten years as a warning.

The Counter-Reformation came to Bohemia in full force. Protestant clergy were expelled. The Protestant nobility was stripped of its lands. Catholic immigrants, many of them German-speaking, were settled on confiscated estates. The Czech language itself was suppressed in favor of German.

Bohemia would not regain its independence until 1918—exactly three hundred years after the defenestration.

The Thirty Years' War

But the war did not end at White Mountain. It was only beginning.

What started as a religious conflict in Bohemia metastasized into a general European war. Denmark intervened on the Protestant side in 1625. Sweden, under the brilliant military commander Gustavus Adolphus, joined in 1630. Catholic France, despite its religion, eventually sided with the Protestants against the Habsburgs—because geopolitics often trumps theology.

The fighting continued until 1648.

By the time the Peace of Westphalia ended the conflict, the Holy Roman Empire had been devastated. Some regions lost a third of their population. Some lost more. The German states would not fully recover for a century.

The modern concept of national sovereignty emerged from the ashes. The principle that nations should not intervene in each other's internal religious affairs became foundational to international law. The secular nation-state began to replace the medieval idea of a unified Christian civilization under Pope and Emperor.

All because some angry Protestants threw two Catholics and their secretary out a window.

The Shadow Defenestration

The story might end there, but Prague was not done with defenestrations.

On March 10, 1948, Jan Masaryk—the Czech foreign minister and son of the country's founding president—was found dead beneath the bathroom window of his ministry building.

The official report called it suicide.

Almost no one believed it.

Czechoslovakia had just undergone a communist coup. Masaryk had remained in the government as a non-partisan, but he was widely believed to oppose the new regime. Whether he was pushed by communist agents, Soviet intelligence operatives, or jumped in despair—or was simply confused and fell—has never been definitively established.

A 2004 Prague police investigation concluded that at least one other person was involved in his death. In 2006, a Russian journalist claimed his mother knew the Soviet intelligence officer who had thrown Masaryk from the window. But a 2019 investigation questioned those findings, suggesting Masaryk might have fallen from an exterior ledge rather than the bathroom window—and was shelved in 2021 for lack of conclusive evidence.

Some call this the "Fourth Defenestration of Prague."

Others call it the third, not counting the 1483 incident.

The ambiguity seems appropriate. In Prague, even the counting of defenestrations is contested.

What the Windows Tell Us

There's something almost absurd about defenestration as a political tool. It's melodramatic. It's inefficient. It requires a building with accessible windows and victims who can be physically overpowered.

Yet the practice reveals something profound about how political violence actually functions.

Successful political violence requires legitimacy—or at least the appearance of it. It must seem, to some audience, like justified action rather than mere murder. Defenestration achieved this through its public, collective nature. When a mob throws someone from a window, no single assassin bears responsibility. The act becomes a communal judgment, almost a form of rough justice.

It's also irreversible in a way that imprisonment is not. You cannot negotiate the release of someone who has already fallen seventy feet. The decision, once made, cannot be walked back. This forced both sides to commit fully to whatever came next.

The Defenestrations of Prague remind us that history often pivots on moments of contingency—on decisions made in heated anger, on violence that spirals beyond anyone's intention. The men who threw Martinice and Slavata from that window in 1618 probably didn't imagine they were starting a war that would kill millions and reshape the map of Europe.

They were making a point.

The point landed harder than anyone expected.