Defenestrations of Prague
From Freepedia
Two incidents in the history of Bohemia are known as the Defenestrations of Prague. The first occurred in 1419 and the second in 1618 (the term 'Defenestration of Prague' is most commonly used to refer to the second incident). Both were conducive to triggering prolonged conflict within Bohemia and beyond. ('Defenestration' is the act of throwing someone or something out of a window.)
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First Defenestration of Prague
The First Defenestration of Prague involved the killing of seven members of the hostile city council by a crowd of radical Czech Hussites on July 30, 1419. The prolonged Hussite Wars broke out shortly afterward, lasting until 1436.
Second Defenestration of Prague
The Second Defenestration of Prague was an event central to the initiation of the Thirty Years' War in 1618.
Some members of the Bohemian aristocracy were effectively in revolt following the 1617 election of Ferdinand (Duke of Styria and a Catholic) as the King of Bohemia. In 1617, Roman Catholic officials ordered the cessation of construction of some Protestant chapels on land which the Catholic clergy claimed belonged to them. Protestants, who claimed that it was royal, not Catholic Church, land, and thus available for their own use, interpreted this as a violation of the right of freedom of religious expression as granted in the Letter of Majesty issued by Emperor Rudolf II in 1609. They feared that the fiercely Catholic Ferdinand would revoke the Protestant rights altogether once he came to the throne.
At Prague Castle on May 23, 1618, an assembly of Protestants tried two Imperial governors, Wilhelm Graf Slavata (1572 - 1652) and Jaroslav Borzita Graf von Martinicz (1582 - 1649), for violating the Letter of Majesty, found them guilty, and threw them, together with their scribe Fabricius, out of the high castle windows, where they landed on a large pile of manure. Both survived.
Roman Catholic Imperial officials claimed that they survived due to the mercy of benevolent angels assisting the righteousness of the Catholic cause. Protestant pamphleteers asserted that their survival had more to do with the horse manure in which they landed.
References
An English translation of part of Slavata's report of the incident is printed in Henry Frederick Schwarz, The Imperial Privy Council in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1943, issued as volume LIII of Harvard Historical Studies), pp. 344-347.
External links
- Descendants of those defenestrated include Ferdinand II of Portugal, Sophie Chotek, and Johann Josef I, Prince of Liechtenstein.
