Defenestration of Prague
On 23 May 1618, Protestant Bohemian Estates, enraged by Habsburg violations of the Letter of Majesty guaranteeing religious freedom, threw two Imperial Catholic governors and a secretary from a window of Prague Castle. The men survived the fall, but the act was an open repudiation of Habsburg sovereignty over Bohemia. The rebels deposed Ferdinand II and elected the Calvinist Frederick V of the Palatinate as king. This was a mass-and-elite attempt to overthrow the existing dynastic-confessional order, structurally a revolution against Habsburg authority within the Bohemian crown lands. The revolt was crushed at the Battle of White Mountain (1620), after which Bohemia was forcibly re-Catholicised and absorbed into the Habsburg hereditary lands. The Defenestration thus stands both as the flashpoint of the Thirty Years' War and as the failed Bohemian revolution whose suppression defined Czech historical memory and the confessional consolidation of the Habsburg monarchy.
- Year: 1618 CE
- Category: Political
