Defenestrations of Prague

Three times in Bohemian history, in 1419, 1483 and 1618, political and religious opponents in Prague were thrown from the windows of public buildings. These defenestrations are among the most famous episodes in Czech history. The first helped start the Hussite Wars, and the third, the best known, set off the Bohemian revolt against the Habsburgs that grew into the Thirty Years' War.

On 30 July 1419 the Hussite priest Jan Želivský led his congregation in procession through Prague to the New Town Hall on what is now Charles Square, where the councillors had refused to release Hussite prisoners. A stone was thrown at the priest from the building and reportedly hit him, and the angry crowd stormed the hall. The judge, the burgomaster and several councillors were thrown from the windows and killed. Pro-Hussite nobles then took control of Bohemia, and the pope proclaimed a crusade against the Hussites, opening the long Hussite Wars.

On 24 September 1483, during the reign of King Vladislaus II, supporters of the Utraquist church, who took communion in both bread and wine, feared they were losing influence and staged a violent coup in the Old Town, New Town and Lesser Town of Prague. The Old Town burgomaster was thrown from a window, as were the bodies of seven New Town councillors. The towns then agreed to act together, and in 1485 an assembly at Kutná Hora declared the two churches equal, a settlement that kept religious peace in Bohemia for 31 years.

By the early seventeenth century most of the Bohemian estates were Protestant, while their kings, the Habsburgs, were Catholic. In 1609 the Emperor Rudolf II issued the Letter of Majesty, guaranteeing the estates freedom of worship. His heir Ferdinand of Styria, elected king of Bohemia in 1617, was a firm supporter of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In 1618 he had the Emperor Matthias order a halt to the building of Protestant churches on royal land, and when the Protestant estates protested he dissolved their assembly.

On 23 May 1618 leaders of the Protestant estates, headed by Count Thurn, confronted four Catholic regents at the Bohemian Chancellery in Prague Castle and demanded to know who had advised the Emperor's hostile letter. Two regents were allowed to leave. The other two, Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice and Vilém Slavata of Chlum, were declared enemies of the kingdom and, with their secretary Philip Fabricius, were thrown out of a high window. All three survived a fall of roughly 16 to 20 metres. Catholics attributed their survival to divine help, while later Protestant pamphlets claimed they had landed in a dung heap, a story apparently unknown to eyewitnesses. Fabricius was later ennobled with the title Baron von Hohenfall, meaning "of the high fall".

Both the Protestant estates and the Catholic Habsburgs began gathering allies for war. After Matthias died in 1619 and Ferdinand was elected emperor, the Bohemians deposed him as their king and chose the Calvinist Frederick V of the Palatinate instead. Imperial and Catholic League forces crushed the rebels at the Battle of White Mountain in November 1620, and twenty-seven leaders of the revolt were executed in Prague's Old Town Square. The conflict spread across the Holy Roman Empire and much of Europe.

The phrase has also been applied loosely to the death of the Czechoslovak foreign minister Jan Masaryk, found below a window of his ministry on 10 March 1948, shortly after the communist coup. Officially ruled a suicide, his death has long been suspected to be murder, but investigations have not reached a firm conclusion.

Our 1400 map shows Bohemia before the first defenestration, and the 1600 and 1650 maps show it within the Habsburg lands before and after the revolt of 1618; today it forms part of the Czech Republic.