The Czechs in a Nutshell

The first and indeed historic defenestration happened on July 30, 1419, four years after Jan Hus, the Czech cleric who thundered so intensely against the trade with indulgences that the Catholic Church (see: Religion) chose to burn him at the stake. Hus’ Protestant supporters — the Hussites — immediately started to revolt against the Catholic Church and its royal protector, King Václav IV. While the Hussites soon gained support from the reformist counsellors of Prague’s Old Town, (heir colleagues in Prague’s New Town had absolutely no sympathy for the rebels.

That attitude cost them their lives. On a bright summer day in 1419, a group of Hussites, led by the former monk Jan Želivský, stormed New Prague’s town hall (on the square that is today known as Charles Square). Furious about the counsellors’ unwillingness to negotiate with them, the Hussites drove 14 municipal bureaucrats, including the burgomaster himself, up to the gallery on the top of the Town Hall’s tower, which was more than 70 meters tall.

There, the poor Catholics were mercilessly thrown out. To make sure (hey would cause no more trouble, the Hussites had even erected lances and spears at the spot where the poor fellows landed. “The enemies of truth were seized by great fear,” a chronicler wrote, and King Václav had no other choice than to accept the new counsellors, chosen by the Hussite rebels. As a result, Prague was totally controlled by anti-Catholic rebels, and defenestration had proved to be an effective political weapon.

In September 1483, another defenestration took place. Except for the scene — the tower of the Old Town’s city hall replaced the tower in the New Town — this was basically a repetition of the first one (Catholics hurled into the air by furious Hussites), so it’s usually not counted as a real defenestration. The incident that has earned itself the title “Second Historic Defenestration” happened only 199 years after the first, but its political impact was so strong that it practically changed the course of history in Bohemia and Moravia.

The Second defenestration was actually triggered in 1526, when Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was elected Czech king. Considering that the majority of the Czech nobility and gentry were Protestants (the Vatican would probably have used the term “extremist troublemakers” here), it might seem strange that they chose a member of the super-Catholic Habsburg dynasty as the head of their state, but, unfortunately, they were not the last Czech elites to suffer from a lack of political providence (see: Communism).

As expected, the relations between the Catholic king and the Czech nobility steadily grew more and more embittered. In May 1618, the Czechs had had enough.

Just as the Hussite rebels 199 years earlier had stormed New Prague’s town hall, the members of the Czech gentry and nobility now broke into the royal quarters on third floor of the Prague Castle’s Ludvík wing. There, the governors Jaroslav Bořita and Vilém Slavata were quickly overpowered, and then mercilessly slung out of the window. Historians differ when it comes to the exact spot where the two imperial bureaucrats actually landed (was it on a shack over the latrine, or in the moat?), but in any case, both fellows survived the assault.

Photo © Terje B. Englund

However, the Second Defenestration was so successful that it encouraged the Czech gentry to go a step further: to kick the Austrian Ferdinand II from the Czech throne and elect the Protestant prince Friedrich of Pfalz as king instead. This shuffle was, as one might expect, met with extremely little sympathy at the imperial court in Vienna. Furious about the rebellion, Ferdinand sent a huge army to Prague to teach the impudent Czechs a lesson. On November 8, 1620, the Protestants were beaten into their boots in the disastrous Battle of White Mountain.

The Second Defenestration, in other words, heralded one of the most significant political changes in Czech history. Bohemia and Moravia were essentially downgraded to provinces in the Habsburg Empire, a situation that lasted, under varying pressure from Vienna, right up until 1918, when Czechoslovakia’s First Republic was founded.

The fact that the third and last defenestration was a proper defenestration, and not a tragic suicide, was established only in March 2002, precisely 54 years after Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jan Masaryk, was found dead early one morning in the courtyard of the Černín Palace, the imposing baroque palace where the Foreign Office resides. Nearly 14 meters above the dead minister, in Masaryk’s private apartment, investigators found an open window and wild disorder.