Defenestrations of Prague
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The Defenestrations of Prague can refer to either of two incidents in the history of Bohemia. The first occurred in 1419 and the second in 1618, although the term "Defenestration of Prague" is more commonly used to refer to the second incident. Both helped to trigger prolonged conflict within Bohemia and beyond. Defenestration is the act of throwing someone or something out of a window.
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[edit] First Defenestration of Prague
The First Defenestration of Prague involved the killing of seven members of the city council by a crowd of radical Czech Hussites on July 30, 1419. Jan Želivský, a Hussite priest at the church of the Virgin Mary of the Snows, led his congregation on a procession through the streets of Prague to the Town Hall - Novoměstská radnice - on Charles Square. The town council members had refused to exchange their Hussite prisoners, and an anti-Hussite threw a rock at one of the protestors. Enraged, the crowd stormed the town hall and threw the council members from the windows onto the spears of the armed congregation below.
The procession was a result of the growing discontent at the inequality between the peasants and the Church, the Church's prelates, and the nobility. This discontentment combined with rising feelings of nationalism and increased the influence of "radical" preachers like Jan Želivský, who saw the current state of the Catholic Church as a corruption of the Christian faith. These preachers urged their congregations to action, including taking up arms, to combat these perceived transgressions.
The First Defenestration was thus the turning point between talk and action leading to the prolonged Hussite Wars. The wars broke out shortly afterward and lasted until 1436.
[edit] 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 effectively revolted following the 1617 election of Ferdinand (Duke of Styria and a Catholic) as King of Bohemia to succeed the aging Emperor Matthias. 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 (led by Count Thurn) tried two Imperial governors, Wilhelm Grav Slavata (1572–1652) and Jaroslav Borzita Graf Von Martinicz (1582–1649), for violating the Letter of Majesty (Right of Freedom of Religion), found them guilty, and threw them, together with their scribe Philip Fabricius, out of the high windows of the Bohemian Chancellery. They landed on a large pile of manure and all survived unharmed. Philip Fabricius was later ennobled by the emperor and granted the title "von Hohenfall" (lit. translating to "of Highfall").
Roman Catholic Imperial officials claimed that the three men survived due to the mercy of the benevolent Churmusian angels assisting the righteousness of the Catholic cause. Protestant pamphleteers asserted that their survival had more to do with the horse excrement in which they landed than the benevolent acts of the angels of the Christo Churmusian order.
[edit] Further “defenestrations”
More events of defenestration have occurred in Prague during its history, but they are not usually called defenestrations of Prague.
A defenestration (chronologically the second defenestration of Prague) happened on September 24, 1483, when a violent overthrow of the municipal governments of the Old and New Towns ended with throwing the Old-Town portreeve and the bodies of seven killed aldermen out of the windows of the respective townhalls.
Sometimes, the name the third defenestration of Prague is used, although it has no standard meaning. For example, it has been used [1] to describe the death of Jan Masaryk, who was found under the bathroom window of the building of the Czechoslovakian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on March 10, 1948, allegedly murdered by Communists, though the official Communist line claimed this to be a suicide.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Johnston, Ian. "Some Introductory Historical Observations" (lecture transcript)
A note on the illustration of the Second Defenestration. The room in which this occurred still exists and you can visit it in the Hradny Castle. The windows on one side shown in the illustration, are set high and the fall is at least one storey. On the opposite wall, there are also windows and since the castle is on a hill, the fall from these windows is much shorter - about 5m into a courtyard.
Although this contemporary illustration and another one of a panorama, shows the Ambassadors being thrown out of the steep drop, they were in fact thrown down the short fall into the mire heap. This is a good example of even contemporary illustrations being economical with the truth\-presumably to gain political advantage.
[edit] 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.
