Not the election: The many defenestrations of Prague
Third time lucky.
Is anyone else getting… really bored of this election? I mean, really bored? Like, “six weeks is far too long a campaign, for goodness’ sake Rishi we’re not Americans” level bored?
Anyway: here’s another one I made earlier, which went to paying subscribers back in March. If you want more of this stuff, you know what to do. Hey, there’s even a special offer on until the big day:
One of the most consequential events in all European history was the Defenestration of Prague, which was exactly what its name suggests: some blokes in the capital of what was then Bohemia and is now Czechia1 being literally chucked out of a window. Put like that it sounds pretty funny, and from some perspectives it was – just not the one where it sparked one of the longest, most destructive wars in the history of the world.
One of the ways in which it is funny, however, is this: it’s not the only historically important incident involving someone getting chucked out of a window in Prague. This is not quite as unlikely as it sounds – thanks to the combination of the power of the mob and the importance of Biblical stories, especially the fate of Jezebel, the act of chucking people out of windows was a fairly common form of political punishment in early modern Europe. The weird thing about the defenestrations of Prague, though, is both how often they happened, and how they tell a story about the Reformation (through, let’s not forget, the unusual medium of chucking people out of windows). All in all, there’s an extremely strong case for staying away from window ledges in the Czech Republic.2
The first defenestration of Prague happened in 1419 and involved a group called the “Hussites”. Four years earlier, Jan Hus – priest, philosopher, a sort of proto-Martin Luther who’d spoken out against the excesses of the Catholic Church – had been tricked into attending a meeting with a promise of safe-conduct. He was promptly arrested and, when he refused to recant, burned at the stake. This had not served to make him any less popular. People kept becoming Hussites; the authorities kept locking them up.
So on 30 July 1419, Jan Želivský, a Czech priest, led a crowd of Hussites to the New Town Hall demanding the release of their mates. Some accounts suggest stones were thrown; others merely insults. What is certain, though, is that the Hussites stormed the building, and threw some councillors out of windows to their deaths. The news was apparently so shocking that the King of Bohemia, Wenceslaus IV, died after hearing it.3
He wasn’t the only one. The event marked the beginning of the Hussite Wars, a conflict between the Hussites and the Catholic authorities that’d last for the next fifteen years. They only ended in 1434, when moderate Hussites agreed to submit to the king and the church in exchange for a degree of religious freedom.
Half a century later, though, Prague’s Hussites began to worry that they might be losing their influence. So they asserted themselves in the only way they knew how: by holding a violent coup and throwing some Catholics out of a town hall window. This had the desired effect – they retained their religious freedoms – but this time there was no war. Good for the people of 15th century Bohemia; disappointing for snarky writers in the 21st century.
The big one though, the dramatic conclusion of the trilogy, came in 1618. By now the sort of concerns that had been expressed by Jan Hus had spread across Europe, thanks partly to his intellectual heir Martin Luther, partly to the widespread realisation among the continent’s princes that breaking with Rome would give them a load more power and a bunch of lovely church assets to sell. By the 1610s, though, the Habsburg rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, of which Bohemia was a part, were looking longingly at the potential of Catholic counter-reformation for asserting the divine right of kings, and Ferdinand, heir to the imperial throne, was going around saying ominous stuff like, “We’ll have all that lot on the bonfire, for a start”.4
So when Catholic officials began blocking the construction of new protestant churches in Prague, the heirs to the city’s Hussite tradition held an assembly to decide what to do, and came up with a novel plan: they’d throw some people out of a window. They tried two imperial regents for violating their promised religious freedom, then chucked them and their secretary out of the window in the council room at Prague Castle. (You can still visit it today!) They then wrote a lengthy apologia explaining why they’d done it.
Despite this being a fairly elevated window, the defenestratees survive (Catholics claimed it was a miracle, Protestants that they’d merely landed in a cart full of dung). Either way, though, this began yet another Bohemian revolt against the Habsburgs and Catholic Church, which in turn marked the start of the Thirty Years War. As that conflict expanded to take in Sweden, Denmark, France, Spain – essentially every European power except, oddly, the British – literally millions would die. In parts of Germany, the population halved.
So yes, although it was technically the third defenestration of Prague, it is by any reasonable count the most important. It’s also the one from which English takes the term “to defenestrate” in its other sense of “to kick someone out of power (as though through a window)”.
There may even have been a fourth defenestration. On 10 March 1948, following the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, the country’s foreign minister Jan Masaryk was found dead on the pavement below the bathroom window of his residence. The authorities ruled it a suicide, but many weren’t convinced, and there have been several inconclusive investigations since. That one, though, doesn’t feature the Reformation, which makes it feel like one of those straight-to-DVD sequels which don’t involve any of the original cast like Home Alone 3.
Anyway, to readers of my new book, A History of the World in 47 Borders, available from all etc., I apologise. In it, I wrongly state that the 1618 Defenestration of Prague, which gave rise to the Thirty Years’ War, should really be known as the Second Defenestration of Prague. It should, of course, be called the Third.
A reminder that the aforementioned book is available now. I don’t have any new reviews to share, but here’s a WhatsApp from my mother, who’s been on a minibreak to a picturesque town in Yorkshire:
The lady in the bookshop said she was excited when your book arrived and is looking forward to reading it. She also said it’s selling quite well so Alan volunteered you for a book signing!! X
It’s – still! – available from Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles, Bert’s Books and all good bookshops. Oh, and also, please subscribe, baby5 needs shoes:
A name, let’s be honest, that really hasn’t caught on.
Because we’re all still calling it that.
Not the one from the Christmas carol; he was the first, and lived five centuries earlier.
I paraphrase.
Henry Scampi needs treats.