Defenestration of Prague
Bohemian nobles threw two royal governors and a secretary out of a window of Prague Castle on 23 May 1618, and the Thirty Years' War began. They fell about twenty metres and survived — into a dry moat, onto a heap of refuse in the Protestant account and caught by angels in the Catholic one. The grievance was religious and constitutional at once. Rudolf II's Letter of Majesty of 1609 had guaranteed religious freedom to the Bohemian estates, and the Habsburg administration under Ferdinand of Styria had been closing Protestant chapels built on what it claimed was church land. Bohemia's crown was elective, and the estates had chosen Habsburgs for a century by habit rather than by right. Prague had a precedent for the method. Hussites had thrown councillors from the New Town hall in 1419, which is why this one is numbered. The estates deposed Ferdinand and offered the crown to Frederick V of the Palatinate, a Calvinist and the head of the Protestant Union, who accepted against almost everyone's advice and reigned one winter. He was destroyed at the White Mountain outside Prague in November 1620 in about two hours. Twenty-seven Bohemian leaders were executed in the Old Town Square in June 1621, Protestantism was outlawed, and much of the nobility's land was confiscated and redistributed. What should have been a local settlement drew in Denmark, Sweden, France and Spain over the following twenty-eight years. Something between a fifth and a third of the German population died. The window is still shown to visitors at Prague Castle.
- Year: 1618 CE
- Category: Political
