Defenestrations & uprisings
The city is famous for revolts and people thrown from windows. Hussite wars, White Mountain, 1848, 1968.
Part of Prague's story
15 moments in this segment.
- — The Battle of the Marchfeld. Mór Than, The Meeting of Ladislas IV and Rudolf of Habsburg on the Marchfeld (1873); the battle that killed Otakar II. Place: Dürnkrut and Jedenspeigen, on the Marchfeld plain north of Vienna Figures: Přemysl Otakar II, king of Bohemia, called Iron and Golden · Rudolf I of Habsburg, king of the Romans · Ladislaus IV of Hungary, allied with Rudolf · Milota of Dědice, Czech commander accused (probably unfairly) of treason Přemysl Otakar II inherits the kingdom in 1253 and within fifteen years has stitched together a personal dominion stretching from the Sudetes to the Adriatic: Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, parts of Friuli. He founds towns from Český Krumlov to Marchegg. He stands for election as king of the Romans in 1273 and loses to a minor Swabian count, Rudolf of Habsburg, whom no one has heard of and whom the electors prefer for that reason. Přemysl Otakar refuses to do homage. Rudolf strips him of the Alpine duchies. War follows. By August 1278 Přemysl Otakar has assembled an army of perhaps fifteen thousand: Bohemian and Moravian heavy cavalry, Polish and Brandenburg auxiliaries, Silesian crossbowmen. Rudolf, with Hungarian cavalry from Ladislaus IV, fields about as many, with the advantage of Cuman horse archers from the Hungarian plain.
- — John the Blind at Crécy. The Battle of Crécy, where John of Luxembourg charged blind into the English line, in a Froissart manuscript illumination. Place: A wheatfield east of the village of Crécy-en-Ponthieu, Picardy Figures: John of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia, blind ten years · Edward the Black Prince, sixteen, his opposite number · Philip VI of France, his brother-in-law and host John has been blind since 1336, ten years before the battle. The cause is uncertain; chroniclers blame an ophthalmia caught on a Lithuanian crusade, surgeons blame each other, modern medicine guesses a syphilitic lesion or chronic uveitis. He continues, blind, to fight everywhere. He has spent the spring of 1346 in Prague arranging the election of his son Charles as King of the Romans against the deposed Wittelsbach. By July he is in northern France, leading three hundred Bohemian and Luxembourg knights for his French brother-in-law. The English have crossed the Somme. The French host is twice their size and undisciplined. The Genoese crossbowmen go in first, their bowstrings wet from a sudden storm, and are cut down by Welsh longbowmen on the rise. The French chivalry charges them from behind in confusion. Toward evening, with the line breaking, the fifty-year-old blind king has his closest knights tie the reins of their horses to his, so that he may ride straight, and they ride into the English line.
- — The First Defenestration. Jan Želivský's procession storms the New Town Hall and hurls seven councillors from the windows, 30 July 1419. Place: New Town Hall, Charles Square Figures: Jan Želivský, Hussite preacher · seven anti-Hussite councillors (thrown out) Jan Hus, priest and rector of the university, was burned at Konstanz on July 6, 1415, having traveled there under the Emperor Sigismund's safe-conduct. The Bohemian church divides almost immediately. By 1419 Prague is a city of two confessions, in which the cup (communion under both kinds, sub utraque specie) has become the symbol of one party and the heresy of another. On July 30, 1419, the radical preacher Jan Želivský leads a procession out of the Church of Our Lady of the Snows. They are carrying the monstrance. They are going to the New Town Hall to demand the release of Hussite prisoners. Someone in the hall throws a stone at the procession. Some accounts say it strikes the monstrance.
- — The Battle of Mohács. Searchers find the drowned body of King Louis II Jagiellon after Mohács, 29 August 1526: Bohemia passes to the Habsburgs. Place: Mohács plain, southern Hungary, and the Csele creek nearby Figures: Louis II Jagiellon, King of Bohemia and Hungary (twenty years old, drowns) · Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottomans · Pál Tomori, archbishop of Kalocsa and Hungarian commander (killed) · Ferdinand of Habsburg, Louis's brother-in-law, in Vienna Louis II Jagiellon is twenty years old in the summer of 1526. He has been king of Bohemia and Hungary since he was ten. The Bohemian estates, mostly, leave him alone; the Hungarian estates, less so. Suleiman the Magnificent crosses the Sava in July with perhaps seventy thousand men. Louis can raise barely twenty-five thousand; the Czech reinforcements, called up too late, are still marching across Moravia when the armies meet on the Mohács plain south of Buda on August 29. The battle lasts an hour and a half. The Hungarian cavalry charges twice and breaks the Ottoman first line; the Ottoman artillery, several hundred guns chained together, breaks the Hungarian cavalry on its return. Pál Tomori, the archbishop commanding, is killed. Most of the Hungarian episcopate dies on the field. Some fourteen thousand Hungarians, including Louis, are dead or fleeing by sunset.
- — The Second Defenestration. Contemporary 1618 broadsheet, Wahrhafftige Zeitung aus Prag, showing the defenestration of Slavata, Martinic, and Fabricius from the eastern window of Prague Castle. Place: Bohemian Chancellery, Prague Castle, third-floor window of the eastern wing Figures: Heinrich Matthias von Thurn, Protestant leader · Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice, regent (thrown) · Vilém Slavata of Chlum, regent (thrown) · Filip Fabricius, secretary (thrown) Rudolf II had signed a Letter of Majesty in 1609 guaranteeing Bohemian Protestants the right to build churches. His successor Matthias and the future Ferdinand II read it narrowly. Two Protestant churches at Hroby and Broumov are closed. The Protestant Estates, meeting in May 1618, draw up a list of grievances and a list of those responsible: Martinice and Slavata, both Catholic regents, both at the Castle. On the morning of May 23, 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 Swedish Siege of 1648. Karel Škréta, detail of the siege of Prague at the Horská Brána, 1648. Škréta painted the defence of the Old Town from inside it; the canvas is itself a Bohemian-baroque founding document. Place: Hradčany and Malá Strana (held by Sweden); Old Town and New Town (held by Prague) Figures: Hans Christoff von Königsmarck, Swedish field marshal · Rudolph Colloredo, imperial commander on the right bank · the Prague student militia · the Jewish defenders of the Old Town walls On the night of 25 July 1648, a force of three thousand Swedes under Königsmarck, guided by a former imperial colonel familiar with the castle's drainage, climbs in through a culvert below the Strahov monastery. By dawn they hold Hradčany and Malá Strana. The Rudolfine collections, what survives of them, are inventoried by Swedish officers within the week and shipped down the Elbe in autumn convoys. Königsmarck takes Arcimboldo's heads, Dürer's Rose Garlands, sixteen Titians, the Codex Argenteus (the silver Bible of Ulfilas), Tycho's mechanical celestial globe, the prosthetic-armor bronze of the emperor Rudolf, and a great deal else. The Codex Argenteus reaches Uppsala. Several Titians do not: the Stockholm-bound flotilla loses three ships off Bornholm in 1659.
- — Battle of Prague. Prussians before Prague, 1757. Hugo Schüllinger, illustration for the Obrázkové dějiny národa českého (Illustrated History of the Czech Nation), 1893. Schwerin falls in the morning, the Austrians break by afternoon, and Frederick II settles into a six-week bombardment of the city. Place: Plain east of Prague, between Šterboholy and Hloubětín; subsequent siege of the city Figures: Frederick II of Prussia · Field Marshal Kurt von Schwerin (killed) · Prince Charles of Lorraine, Austrian commander · Field Marshal Leopold von Daun, relieving force Frederick II enters Bohemia in April 1757 with four armies on converging axes, intending to knock Austria out of the war in a single campaign. On 6 May he meets Prince Charles of Lorraine east of Prague with sixty-four thousand men. The Austrian line is anchored on a ridge near Šterboholy. The Prussian flank attack stalls in marshy ground; Schwerin grabs a regimental colour and leads the second line in person. He is killed by canister shot within minutes. Frederick takes the field by nightfall at a cost of fourteen thousand casualties to the Austrians' thirteen thousand. It is the largest battle in the western theatre of the war to that point, larger than anything Marlborough fought. Forty thousand men lie dead or wounded across six kilometres. The surviving Austrian army does not retreat south; it falls back into Prague.
- — Joseph II Dies. Joseph II on his deathbed, 20 February 1790, by Georg Conräder. Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. He dies at forty-eight, having spent the last winter rescinding most of his own reforms in the face of Hungarian and Belgian revolt. Place: Hofburg, Vienna; news reaches Prague within four days Figures: Joseph II, aged 48 · Leopold II, his brother and successor · the Hungarian Diet, in open revolt over the language decree Joseph dies at forty-eight, ten years after his mother. He has issued, by the count of his secretaries, more than six thousand decrees: religious toleration, monastic dissolution, civil marriage, the abolition of serfdom in 1781, the abolition of the death penalty in 1787 (the second in modern Europe, the year after his brother Leopold's Tuscany), the German-language decree for the entire monarchy in 1784. He has redrawn parish boundaries, opened cemeteries outside city walls (Prague's old churchyards are emptied accordingly in 1784, the bones moved to Olšany), and tried to ban reusable coffins. He has done in a decade what his mother declined to attempt in forty years. By the time he dies, most of it is failing. The Hungarian nobility refuses to administer his decrees. The Austrian Netherlands have revolted (the Brabant Revolution of 1789). The Bohemian peasants, freed from serfdom, are confused about what their rights actually are. The war against the Turks, which he led in person in 1788, has gone badly. He has tuberculosis. He coughs blood into linen handkerchiefs through the autumn of 1789.
- — The June Uprising. Barricades across the Old Town, June 1848, period lithograph Place: Barricades across the Old Town and Lesser Town; Field Marshal's batteries on Letná and Hradčany Figures: Alfred I, Prince of Windischgrätz, commanding · Karel Sabina and the radical students · the Slavic Congress (in session) The first pan-Slav congress in history is meeting in Prague at the Žofín island hall, delegates arriving from Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, and Galicia. František Palacký presides. The mood across Europe is the mood of 1848: Vienna has had its March, Paris its February, and Prague has just had a partial constitutional concession from the new emperor Ferdinand. On Whitsun Monday, June 12, students and radicals hold an open-air mass on Wenceslas Square, then march. By afternoon there are barricades. Field Marshal Alfred I, Prince of Windischgrätz, commands the garrison from the Lesser Town. He withdraws his troops across the river, takes them up to Letná plain and the Hradčany ridge, and trains the imperial guns on the city below. Five days of intermittent shelling follow.
- — The Closure of the Czech Universities. Jan Opletal, medical student, photographed around 1934. Shot during the 28 October 1939 demonstrations, his funeral on 15 November triggered the closure of the Czech universities two days later. Place: Ruzyně barracks; the streets of Prague; Sachsenhausen Figures: Jan Opletal, medical student (shot 28 October, died 11 November) · nine student leaders, executed at Ruzyně · 1,200 students deported to Sachsenhausen October 28, 1939 is the twenty-first anniversary of Czechoslovak independence. Demonstrations break out across Prague despite the German ban. A young medical student, Jan Opletal, is shot in the abdomen on Žitná street. He dies on November 11. His funeral procession on November 15 turns into a vast silent demonstration: thousands of students walk behind the coffin from the Pathology Institute to Wilson Station, where the body is sent home to Moravia. Berlin, watching, decides on a response disproportionate by design. Hitler personally orders reprisal. K. H. Frank, State Secretary, signs the operational directive late on November 16.
- — The Prague Uprising. Citizens building a barricade during the Prague Uprising, May 1945. Place: Czech Radio building (Vinohradská 12); Old Town Square; Charles Bridge; barricades across the city Figures: The Czech National Council (Albert Pražák, Josef Smrkovský) · General Karel Kutlvašr, military commander · General Andrei Vlasov's ROA, briefly helping · SS-Gruppenführer Carl von Pückler-Burghauss, holding the German command On the morning of May 5, with the war in Europe effectively over (Hitler dead five days, Berlin fallen two), Czech announcers at the radio building on Vinohradská street begin broadcasting in Czech only, without the German parallel. SS units inside try to seize the studios. At 12:33 p.m. the announcer Zdeněk Mančal broadcasts: Voláme českou policii, voláme český rozhlas, voláme všechny Čechy!, We call the Czech police, we call Czech radio, we call all Czechs. By nightfall there are 1,600 barricades across the city, built from cobbles, streetcar rails, overturned trams, mattresses, wardrobes, and beer barrels. German road signs come down. Swastikas are torn from buildings. The Wehrmacht commander in Bohemia, Ferdinand Schörner, has 900,000 troops in Army Group Centre still under arms and orders them to fight through the city to reach American lines.
- — Jan Masaryk falls from a Czernín window. Jan Masaryk, son of the founder-president, who fell from the Czernín Palace window on 10 March 1948. Place: Inner courtyard of the Czernín Palace, Hradčany Figures: Jan Masaryk, Foreign Minister, son of TGM · the investigating policemen of 1948, 1968, 1993, 2003 Jan Masaryk, sixty-one, son of the founder-president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, has remained at the Foreign Ministry through the February coup, the only non-communist of consequence to stay. He explains, to friends who ask why, that he wants to keep one Czech face in the cabinet that the West will still recognize. He has flown to London, Washington, Paris through the war as foreign minister in exile; he is half American (his mother was Charlotte Garrigue of Brooklyn); he speaks the English of P. G. Wodehouse. The communists need him for the same reason he says he stays. On the night of March 9, his apartment on the top floor of the Czernín Palace, the foreign ministry, is locked from inside. At 6:25 a.m. his body is found in pyjamas in the inner courtyard, forty feet below his bathroom window.
- — The Prague Spring. Soviet T-55 tanks on the streets of Prague, 21 August 1968. The intervention ended the reform programme of Alexander Dubček. Place: Wenceslas Square, Czechoslovak Radio building, the streets of the Old and New Towns Figures: Alexander Dubček, First Secretary · Ludvík Svoboda, President · Leonid Brezhnev, in Moscow · the Warsaw Pact armies (Soviet, Polish, East German, Hungarian, Bulgarian) Dubček is elected First Secretary in January 1968. By April the Action Programme is published: press freedom, freedom of assembly, freedom to travel, market correctives to a planned economy, federalization with Slovakia. The phrase is socialism with a human face. Writers publish openly. Students argue in cafés. The June manifesto Two Thousand Words, drafted by Ludvík Vaculík, is signed by seventy intellectuals and read aloud in factories. Moscow watches with growing alarm. Warsaw Pact maneuvers stage on the border through July. Brezhnev meets Dubček at Čierna nad Tisou and Bratislava in early August. Dubček returns to Prague believing he has bought time.
- — The State Funeral. at St Vitus Cathedral, 23 December 2011. Schwarzenberg eulogized; Cardinal Duka celebrated; Clinton, Albright, Sarkozy, Cameron, Major and Wałęsa came to Prague. Place: St Vitus Cathedral, Prague Castle Figures: Karel Schwarzenberg, foreign minister, eulogist · Cardinal Dominik Duka, celebrant · Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron, John Major, Lech Wałęsa, Hillary Clinton, in attendance The cortège leaves Old Town Square in the late morning and crosses Charles Bridge on foot, the coffin carried by Castle Guard. It is the route every Bohemian king has taken to coronation since the bridge was finished, the same stones Parléř laid with the eggs-and-lime mortar of legend. The crowd lines the bridge four deep. Bells ring at Týn, at Saint Nicholas, at the Loreta, at Saint Vitus. The cathedral is full at noon. Cardinal Duka celebrates. Karel Schwarzenberg, Havel's closest political ally since 1989 and his chancellor for the first presidential term, delivers the eulogy. The Plzeňský Prazdroj brewery has sent a wooden cask of pilsner for the wake, a gesture the family had requested in advance.
- — Lidice is erased. Memorial to the Child Victims of War by Marie Uchytilová, Lidice. Eighty-two bronze figures, one for each child of Lidice murdered at Chełmno. Place: Lidice, 20 km west of Prague Figures: 173 men shot at the Horák farm · 184 women deported to Ravensbrück · 82 children gassed at Chełmno · Karl Hermann Frank, ordering · the SS Schutzpolizei of Kladno, executing The investigation of Heydrich's killing produces no suspects in Lidice. A letter intercepted by the Gestapo, between a worker in the Slaný steelworks and a girlfriend, mentions a man going abroad; the trail leads to two Lidice families, the Horáks and the Stříbrných, whose sons are in fact in the Czechoslovak forces in Britain. There is no connection to the assassination. The pretext is enough. On the night of June 9, the village is sealed by SS units from Kladno. The men are gathered in the barn of the Horák family. The women and children are taken to the school. The subject dates from 1942; this photograph was taken in 2020.
