Defenestrations of Prague

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Defenestration is the act of throwing someone or something out of a window.

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.

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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.

[edit] Background

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. While they were marching a stone was thrown at Želivský from the window of the town hall. [1] The mob became enraged at this event and led by Jan Žižka stormed the town hall. Once inside the hall the group threw the judge, the burgomaster, and several members of the town council out of the window and into the street, where they were killed by the fall.[2]

King Wenzel (Václav IV in Czech, Wenceslaus in English), upon hearing this news, was so excited that he died a little time after, supposedly due to the shock.[3]

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 such as 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.

A contemporary woodcut of the defenestration in 1618.[a]
A contemporary woodcut of the defenestration in 1618.[a]

[edit] Second Defenestration of Prague

The Second Defenestration of Prague was central to the start of the Thirty Years' War in 1618.

Some members of the Bohemian aristocracy rebelled 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 that the Catholic clergy claimed ownership of. Protestants contended the land in question was royal, rather than owned by the Catholic Church, and was thus available for their own use. Protestants interpreted the cessation order as a violation of the right to freedom of religious expression granted in the Letter of Majesty issued by Emperor Rudolf II in 1609. They also 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, Vilem Slavata of Chlum (1572–1652) and Jaroslav Borzita of Martinice (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 in a dry moat and survived. Philip Fabricius was later ennobled by the emperor and granted the title von Hohenfall (lit. meaning "of Highfall").

Roman Catholic Imperial officials claimed that the three men survived due to the mercy of 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.

[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 town halls.

Sometimes, the name the third defenestration of Prague is used, although it has no standard meaning. For example, it has been used [4] to describe the death of Jan Masaryk, who was found below the bathroom window of the building of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs on March 10, 1948, almost certainly murdered by Communists, though the official Communist line claimed this to be a suicide. The Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal died from a fall from a window in 1997, apparently when trying to feed birds.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Catholic Encyclopedia
  2. ^ Catholic Encyclopedia
  3. ^ Catholic Encyclopedia
  4. ^ Johnston, Ian. "Some Introductory Historical Observations" (lecture transcript)

a. ^  The room in which this occurred still exists and you can visit it in the Hradcany Castle. The windows on one side shown in the illustration, are set high and the fall is at least one story. 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.

This is a good example of even contemporary illustrations being economical with the truth, presumably to gain political advantage. Although, another reading may simply be the fact that a woodcut print is laterally reversed when printed, so unless it was initially drawn in reverse on the wood-block by the artist, it would read reversed when printed on paper. Admittedly though, most artists would have reversed the drawing when tracing it onto the wood-block, so other information within the image would have to be read to determine correct point of view.

[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.

[edit] External links