The Defenestration of Prague

MAY 23 1618 · 12:00

Imperial governors hurled from the chancery windows of Prague Castle, 23 May 1618. Place: Bohemian Chancellery, Prague Castle, third-floor eastern wing Figures: Heinrich Matthias von Thurn, Protestant leader · Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice, regent · Vilém Slavata of Chlum, regent · Filip Fabricius, secretary The Letter of Majesty Emperor Rudolf II signed the Majestätsbrief in 1609, guaranteeing Bohemian Protestants the right to build churches. His successor Matthias and his cousin Ferdinand, the future Ferdinand II, read it narrowly. Two Protestant churches at Hroby and Broumov are closed. The Protestant Estates meet in May 1618 with a list of grievances and a list of those responsible: Martinice and Slavata, both Catholic regents, both at the Castle. On the morning of 23 May, a delegation led by Count Thurn climbs to the chancellery. There is shouting, an attempt at justification, and then, around nine o'clock, the act. The Window and the War Martinice goes first, headfirst from the third-floor window: seventy feet to the moat. Slavata follows, clinging to the sill until his fingers are beaten loose. The secretary Fabricius, who has done nothing in particular, is thrown after them. All three survive (Catholic propaganda credits the Virgin Mary; Protestant chronicles credit a soft landing on accumulated household refuse in the dry moat). Within a year Bohemia is in open revolt. A Calvinist count, Frederick V of the Palatinate, is elected king. Within two years Frederick loses everything at the Battle of White Mountain. The defenestration is the conventional starting gun of the Thirty Years' War, which kills perhaps eight million across the empire and ends with the Peace of Westphalia (see [[peace-of-westphalia-1648]]) thirty years and five months later. Video: Peter Wilson, the leading modern historian of the war, opens with the act that lit the fuse.