The Defenestration of Prague: Why Throwing People out of Windows Rarely Ends Well

Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice went first. On the morning of 23 May 1618, in a panelled chancellery room high in Prague Castle, a group of Protestant noblemen seized one of the Emperor's senior Catholic regents by the arms and legs, hauled him across the floor and heaved him, heavy cloak and all, through an open window. Martinice was a grand man in grand clothes, and grand men are not built for flight. He went out screaming for the Virgin Mary. Beneath him lay a drop of somewhere between fifteen and twenty metres down the castle wall to a dry moat below.

His colleague, Vilém Slavata, understood what was coming and fought it. He clung to the window frame and held on until someone struck his knuckles with the hilt of a dagger, and then he, too, was gone. Then, because the mood in the room had shifted from confrontation to momentum, the nobles threw out the regents' secretary, Philip Fabricius, a man whose only crime was holding the pen. According to one well-travelled story, a nobleman leaned out after Martinice's plunge and jeered, "We will see if his Mary will help him." A moment later, looking down, he is said to have muttered in disbelief: "By God, his Mary has helped him."

All three men survived. Slavata cracked his head badly, but he lived. Martinice picked himself up. Fabricius scrambled to his feet and ran for Vienna to tell the Emperor what had happened. Catholic writers soon announced that angels had caught the falling men, or that the Virgin had spread her cloak beneath them. Protestant pamphleteers offered a less celestial explanation: the regents had landed in a heap of dung. Historians still argue over whether it was the dung, the sloping ground, the thick layers of seventeenth-century clothing, or plain luck. It hardly matters. Nobody died that morning. Over the next thirty years however, some millions of people would.

A City with Form

To understand why a group of noblemen thought a window was a reasonable place to settle a political disagreement, it helps to know that Prague had done this before.

On 30 July 1419, a Hussite procession led by the radical preacher Jan Želivský marched on the New Town Hall, demanding the release of prisoners held there. Someone threw a stone from a window at the crowd, or so the crowd later claimed. The mob stormed the building and hurled the burgomaster and several councillors out of the windows, and those who survived the fall were finished off in the street below. King Wenceslas IV is said to have been so shaken by the news that he died of a stroke within weeks. What followed was not a return to order but the Hussite Wars: fifteen years of crusades, sieges and slaughter across Bohemia and its neighbours.

So when the Protestant nobles of 1618 reached for the window, they were not improvising. They were quoting. Defenestration (throwing someone out of a window) had a place in Bohemian political memory as an act of righteous defiance, a way of saying that the people of this kingdom would not be pushed around by distant overlords. It was theatre with a pedigree. The trouble with pedigrees is that they include the endings as well as the beginnings, and the last time Prague had opened its windows this way, it had set off a generation of war. Nobody in the chancellery that May morning seems to have dwelt on that part.

A Kingdom on Edge

Bohemia in 1618 was a Protestant-majority kingdom ruled by a Catholic dynasty. The Habsburgs held the Bohemian crown, alongside Austria, Hungary and the title of Holy Roman Emperor, and they held it uneasily. Bohemia was one of the most religiously diverse places in Europe: Utraquists descended from the old Hussite movement, Lutherans, Calvinists, the Unity of the Brethren, and a Catholic minority that happened to include the royal family and many of its officials.

For a while, this arrangement was held together by paperwork. In 1609 the Emperor Rudolf II, weak and cornered in a family power struggle, had signed the Letter of Majesty, a charter guaranteeing religious freedom to the Bohemian estates and giving Protestants the right to build churches and run their own affairs. Protestant nobles treated the Letter as a constitutional bedrock. Many Catholic officials treated it as a concession extracted at a moment of weakness, to be quietly worn down when the moment passed.

The wider empire was just as fragile. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 had settled Germany's first round of religious conflict with a formula later summed up as cuius regio, eius religio: whoever ruled a territory chose its religion. It was a truce, not a solution. It made no provision for Calvinists, it left church property disputes to fester, and by the early 1600s it was fraying badly. In 1608 a group of Protestant princes formed the Protestant Union; in 1609 Catholic princes answered with the Catholic League. Germany now had two armed camps, each convinced the other was preparing to strike first.

Then the Bohemian succession changed hands. The childless Emperor Matthias arranged for his cousin, Ferdinand of Styria, to be accepted as the next King of Bohemia in 1617. Ferdinand had been educated by Jesuits and had already rolled back Protestantism in his own lands in Inner Austria, and he made little secret of his view that religious toleration was an error to be corrected. The Bohemian estates, under pressure, accepted him anyway. Many of them regretted it almost at once.

The flashpoints were small, local and very much on the nose. At Broumov (Braunau), Protestants had built a church on land the local Catholic abbot said was his; the church was closed. At Hrob (Klostergrab), another Protestant church, on land belonging to the Archbishop of Prague, was pulled down. To the Protestant nobles these were test cases, proof that the Letter of Majesty was being dismantled one building at a time. They petitioned the Emperor. The reply from Vienna was cold, and the regents in Prague, the men who governed Bohemia in the absent Emperor's name, were blamed for it. Martinice and Slavata in particular had reputations as hardline Catholics who had refused to sign the Letter of Majesty in the first place. When the Protestant assembly was told it was forbidden to meet again, its more radical members decided the time for petitions was over.

The Room Upstairs

On the morning of 23 May, a delegation of Protestant nobles led by Count Heinrich Matthias von Thurn climbed the stairs of the Old Royal Palace to the Bohemian Chancellery. Thurn was a soldier, ambitious and aggrieved; he had recently lost an important office and blamed the Catholic party for it. The men who followed him were armed, and several of them had spent the previous evening agreeing on what they meant to do.

What happened in the chancellery had the shape of a trial without the substance of one. The nobles confronted the regents with the letter from Vienna and demanded to know whether they had had a hand in drafting it. They accused them of violating the Letter of Majesty and of plotting against the kingdom's liberties. The regents protested, evaded, and appealed for time. There were four of them present, and the nobles made a distinction: two, Adam of Sternberg and Diepold of Lobkowicz, were judged less guilty and led from the room. Martinice and Slavata were not. The verdict had been reached long before the arguments began.

That is the thing to note about the Defenestration of Prague. It was not a moment of lost tempers. It was a planned escalation, chosen precisely because it could not be taken back. Thurn and the radicals wanted to make compromise impossible, to bind the more cautious nobles to the rebellion by making them all complicit in an act the Emperor could never forgive. In that, and only in that, the defenestration succeeded brilliantly.

And then, as you already know, the window.

The Bill Comes Due

The survivors scattered. Slavata, bleeding from the head, was carried to shelter in the nearby Lobkowicz palace, where Polyxena of Lobkowicz, a formidable Catholic noblewoman, reportedly refused to hand him over to the rebels. Martinice escaped Prague in disguise. Fabricius reached Vienna and delivered his report to the Emperor. He was later ennobled for his trouble, with a title usually rendered as "von Hohenfall", or "of the high fall", which may be the only honour in European history awarded for landing.

The rebels, meanwhile, moved fast. The Bohemian estates set up a government of thirty directors, raised an army, expelled the Jesuits and appealed for help across Protestant Europe. When Emperor Matthias died in March 1619 and Ferdinand was elected Holy Roman Emperor that August, the Bohemians took the step that turned a revolt into a European crisis: they declared Ferdinand deposed as their king and offered the crown to Frederick V, the young Calvinist Elector Palatine.

Frederick accepted. He was crowned in Prague in November 1619, and his reign lasted almost exactly one winter, which is why history remembers him as the Winter King. On 8 November 1620, the combined forces of the Emperor and the Catholic League met the Bohemian army at White Mountain, just outside Prague. The battle took about two hours. The Bohemian army broke, Frederick fled, and the rebellion collapsed.

The reckoning was deliberate and public. On 21 June 1621, twenty-seven leaders of the revolt, nobles, knights and burghers, were executed in Prague's Old Town Square. The rector of the university, the physician Jan Jesenius, had his tongue cut out before he was beheaded. Twelve heads were hung in iron baskets from the Old Town Bridge Tower, where they stayed for a decade. Rebel estates were confiscated on a vast scale and handed to Catholic loyalists, many of them foreign. Protestantism was outlawed, and those who would not convert were driven into exile, among them the educator Jan Amos Komenský, better known as Comenius, who spent the rest of his life abroad. Czech historians would later call the long period that followed the Temno, the Darkness, a time when Bohemia's native nobility, its Protestant faith and much of its written culture were suppressed.

If the story had ended there, it would be remembered as a failed rebellion brutally put down. It did not end there. It had barely started.

A War That Fed on Itself

The problem with lighting a fire in the middle of a tinderbox is that the fire does not respect your original plans. Frederick had lost Bohemia, but he still claimed the Palatinate, his hereditary lands on the Rhine, and Spanish and Bavarian troops marched in to take them. Protestant princes who had kept their heads down now saw the Emperor's power growing alarmingly. Foreign rulers who had watched from the sidelines began to calculate what a victorious Habsburg dynasty would mean for them.

What followed is conventionally divided into phases, each one pulling in a new power that thought it could settle matters quickly. Christian IV of Denmark intervened in 1625 to defend the Protestant cause (and his own interests in northern Germany) and was beaten. The Emperor, riding high, issued the Edict of Restitution in 1629, ordering the return of church lands secularised since 1552, a move that terrified Protestants who had until then stayed loyal. In 1630 Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden landed on the Baltic coast with a disciplined, modern army and tore through Catholic forces at Breitenfeld in 1631, before dying in the fog at Lützen the following year. From 1635, Catholic France, directed by a cardinal, Richelieu, entered the war openly on the Protestant side, because by then the conflict had long since stopped being mainly about religion. It had become a contest between the French Bourbons and the Habsburgs for mastery of Europe, fought largely on German soil.

The armies that fought these campaigns were a new kind of monster. States of the early seventeenth century did not have the tax systems, bureaucracies or supply networks to maintain large permanent forces. So they hired them. War became a business, run by military contractors who raised regiments on credit and expected to be repaid in plunder, ransom and "contributions" extracted from whatever region the army happened to occupy. The greatest of these entrepreneurs, Albrecht von Wallenstein, a Bohemian nobleman who had grown enormously rich on confiscated rebel estates, built an imperial army of unprecedented size on the principle that war should pay for itself. It did, in the sense that the population of central Europe paid for it.

Behind every army trailed a second army: wives, children, servants, merchants, prostitutes and hangers-on, sometimes outnumbering the soldiers themselves. This moving city needed feeding every day. When a region was stripped bare, the army moved to the next one, and the next. Villages were plundered by one side, then by the other, and then by the first side again on its return. The German folk memory of the war preserved its cruelties in grim shorthand. The "Swedish drink", in which liquid manure was forced down a victim's throat to make him reveal where he had hidden his valuables, was remembered for centuries, whichever army actually practised it.

The single worst day came at Magdeburg. On 20 May 1631, after a long siege, imperial and Catholic League troops under Count Tilly and Gottfried Heinrich zu Pappenheim stormed the Protestant city on the Elbe. What followed was an orgy of killing, rape and looting, and then a fire that consumed almost the entire city. Of perhaps 25,000 inhabitants, around 20,000 died. The bodies were thrown into the river for days afterwards. The event so shocked contemporaries that it gave the German language a new verb, magdeburgisieren, to "Magdeburgise", meaning to annihilate a city utterly. By some accounts, only a few hundred people were still living among the ruins years later.

The Arithmetic of Ruin

Numbers from the seventeenth century are uncertain things, and historians argue about them fiercely. But even the conservative estimates are staggering. Most modern figures for deaths across the Holy Roman Empire fall between roughly four and eight million, out of a pre-war population of perhaps sixteen to twenty million. That means the empire lost somewhere between a fifth and a third of its people. By many estimates, this was a proportionally greater loss than Germany suffered in either of the world wars of the twentieth century.

The averages hide the worst of it. Some regions came through relatively lightly. Others were gutted. Parts of Württemberg, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Thuringia and the Palatinate lost half their population or more. Whole villages simply disappeared from the map, their fields reverting to forest and scrub. Towns that had been prosperous centres of trade shrank to a fraction of their former size. Bohemia itself, where it all began, lost a large share of its people to war, flight and disease, on top of the forced exile of its Protestant elite.

And here is the crucial point: most of the dead were not soldiers, and most were not killed by weapons. Battle deaths were a relatively small fraction of the total. The great killers were disease and hunger, and both travelled with the armies.

Armies of the period were ideal vehicles for epidemic disease. Soldiers lived packed together in filthy camps, moved constantly, and billeted themselves in civilian homes. They carried typhus, then known as the "Hungarian disease" or "camp fever", spread by the lice that infested every regiment. They carried dysentery. And they carried plague, which surged across Germany in waves throughout the war, with particularly lethal outbreaks in the 1620s and 1630s. Where armies went, epidemics followed, and they did not stay in the camps. Refugees fleeing into walled towns packed them beyond capacity, and the towns became death traps.

Famine completed the work. Farmers who had been robbed of their seed grain, their draught animals and their harvests could not plant again. Many simply fled. Food prices soared, all the more because the early years of the war saw a currency catastrophe, the Kipper- und Wipperzeit, in which princes and mints debased their coinage so recklessly that money became almost worthless. The weather did not help either: the war fell in the depths of the Little Ice Age, a period of cold summers and failed harvests across the northern hemisphere. Chroniclers recorded people eating grass, bark, cats and dogs. From besieged Breisach, among other places, came reports of cannibalism.

The terror seeped into everything. Witch persecutions reached one of their most savage peaks in the late 1620s, particularly in the prince-bishoprics of Würzburg and Bamberg, where hundreds were burned. In the Bavarian village of Oberammergau, the inhabitants vowed in 1633 that if God spared them from the plague, they would perform a play of Christ's Passion every ten years. They are still keeping that vow today.

A Continent Unprepared

It is tempting to look back and ask why nobody stopped it. The answer is that seventeenth-century Europe had almost no machinery for stopping a war of this kind, and very little for surviving one.

There was no system of international law in any modern sense, no standing forum where rulers could negotiate, no accepted framework for how a war should end. Diplomacy existed, but it was slow, personal and tangled up with questions of dynastic honour and religious truth, neither of which lent themselves to compromise. Each new intervention was launched on the assumption that one more campaign would settle things. None did.

The states themselves were not built for a long war. They could not tax effectively enough to pay their armies, so they outsourced war to contractors who paid themselves by plunder. That meant governments could not control their own forces. Unpaid soldiers mutinied, deserted or simply turned bandit. Commanders pursued their own interests; Wallenstein became so powerful and so unpredictable that the Emperor had him assassinated at Eger (Cheb) in 1634. An army that feeds on the land has no reason to stop, because stopping means not being paid.

Nor was there any capacity to deal with the human consequences. There was no public health system worth the name and no understanding of how typhus or plague spread. Relief for refugees, where it existed at all, came from overwhelmed churches and town councils. Medicine offered bleeding, prayer and quarantine, in roughly that order of effectiveness. Europe went into the war with the tools of the sixteenth century and faced a catastrophe that needed the tools of the twentieth.

The Long Road Back

When the fighting finally stopped, recovery took generations. In many parts of Germany, the population did not return to its pre-war level for two or three generations, and some areas took the better part of a century. Abandoned villages stayed empty. Rulers offered land, tax exemptions and religious toleration to lure settlers into depopulated provinces; Brandenburg-Prussia in particular grew in part by welcoming refugees and migrants, including French Huguenots later in the century.

The economic damage was just as lasting. Trade routes had been broken, towns burned, capital destroyed and skilled workers killed or scattered. The great commercial centres of southern Germany, once among the richest in Europe, never fully regained their earlier position. Meanwhile, the Dutch, the English and the French, whose home territories had largely escaped the devastation, forged ahead. For German-speaking Europe, the war left a gap in development that historians have long linked to its later political fragmentation and its late arrival as a unified power.

It also left scars in the culture. In 1633 the French printmaker Jacques Callot published The Miseries of War, a series of etchings of looting, torture and mass hangings from a tree, one of the first great anti-war works of European art. In 1668 Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, who had been caught up in the war as a boy, published Simplicissimus, a picaresque novel of the war told through the eyes of a naive youth swept from atrocity to atrocity. Three centuries later, Bertolt Brecht returned to the Thirty Years War for Mother Courage and Her Children, written as Europe slid into another catastrophe. For Germans, until the twentieth century gave them worse material, this war was the national trauma, the benchmark against which all later suffering was measured.

Westphalia: Peace by Exhaustion

The war did not end because anyone won it. It ended because everyone was exhausted.

Peace talks began in the early 1640s in two Westphalian towns, Catholic powers gathering at Münster and Protestant ones at Osnabrück, about fifty kilometres apart. It was, in effect, the first great diplomatic congress in European history, with envoys from most of Europe's powers and dozens of German principalities. The negotiations dragged on for about five years, partly because the fighting continued throughout and every change on the battlefield changed the bargaining positions, and partly because the delegates spent an extraordinary amount of energy on protocol: who entered a room first, who sat where, who addressed whom by which title. These were not trivial matters to them. Rank was power, and conceding it was conceding the argument.

The war ended, fittingly, where it had begun. In the summer and autumn of 1648, Swedish troops were besieging Prague. They took the Lesser Town and the castle, where they looted the famous collections of Rudolf II and carried them off to Stockholm, and they fought the defenders of the Old Town on the Charles Bridge. The fighting stopped only when news arrived that the peace had been signed.

The treaties signed at Münster and Osnabrück in October 1648, together with the earlier Spanish-Dutch treaty of that year, are known collectively as the Peace of Westphalia. They redrew the map and rewrote the rules. The independence of the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation was formally recognised. Sweden gained territory on the Baltic and North Sea coasts. France confirmed its hold on Metz, Toul and Verdun and gained lands in Alsace. Calvinism was finally recognised alongside Catholicism and Lutheranism, and religious disputes within the empire were to be settled by agreed rules rather than force, with 1624 fixed as a "normative year" for deciding who held which church property. The German princes gained the right to conduct their own foreign policy and make alliances, provided these were not directed against the Emperor.

Not everyone was pleased. The papal envoy at Münster, Fabio Chigi, refused to sign, and Pope Innocent X formally condemned the settlement. That in itself tells you something. For the first time, the major powers of Europe had made a comprehensive peace without the Church's blessing and over its objections. Religion, the cause in whose name so much of the killing had been done, was being moved out of the centre of international politics.

From Westphalia came the ideas later generations would call the "Westphalian system": that the world is made up of sovereign states; that each state has authority within its own borders; that states are, in principle, legally equal regardless of size; and that one state should not interfere in another's internal affairs, including its religion. Alongside these came a growing faith in balance of power, in diplomatic congresses, and in a body of law governing relations between states. The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius had published his great work on the law of war and peace, De jure belli ac pacis, in 1625, in the middle of the carnage; its influence grew enormously in the decades after.

Historians now warn, rightly, against treating Westphalia as a clean founding moment. The treaties themselves said little about sovereignty in the abstract, the Holy Roman Empire survived for another century and a half, and war between France and Spain carried on until 1659. Much of the "Westphalian order" was built up gradually and read back into 1648 later. But myths matter too. The principles that came to be associated with Westphalia became the grammar of international relations, and they still are.

What It Gave Us, What It Took

Look at the Charter of the United Nations and you will find Westphalia everywhere: in the sovereign equality of its members, in the principle of territorial integrity, and in the commitment not to intervene in matters within a state's domestic jurisdiction. Every modern argument about whether one country may intervene in another's affairs, whether to stop a genocide or to topple a regime, is an argument with Westphalia. Every debate about what the European Union's pooled sovereignty means, or whether we have entered a "post-Westphalian" world of global institutions and non-state actors, begins from the order that emerged from the ruins of 1648. When commentators reached for a historical parallel to describe the tangled, multi-sided, sectarian wars of the modern Middle East, the comparison many of them chose was the Thirty Years War.

The war gave us other things, too. It pushed European states toward standing armies under government control, paid for by regular taxation, precisely because the alternative, war by private contractor, had proved so ruinous. It helped drive the growth of centralised bureaucracies. It helped make religious toleration, however grudging, a principle of political survival rather than a sign of weakness.

But it destroyed a great deal as well. It destroyed the Holy Roman Empire as an effective political power, leaving German-speaking Europe as a patchwork of hundreds of territories that would not unite until 1871, with all the consequences that late, forced unification would bring. It destroyed Bohemia's independence, its Protestant nobility and, for two centuries, much of its Czech-language culture. It hastened the decline of Spain as Europe's dominant power. And it destroyed, beyond any accounting, millions of individual lives: the farmers who lost everything, the children who died of typhus in overcrowded towns, the women of Magdeburg, the refugees who never found their way home.

Outside Central Europe, the Thirty Years War is not much studied. In the English-speaking world, and certainly in Australian classrooms, it tends to be overshadowed by the wars that followed, a confusing blur of Swedish kings and Bohemian nobles squeezed between the Reformation and the English Civil War. That neglect says more about us than about the war. It was no less devastating for being unfamiliar, and it is no less important. The world we live in, with its sovereign states, its international law and its fragile rules about when one nation may interfere in another's affairs, was built in large part by people who had seen what the alternative looked like.

Why This Matters

Go back to that room in Prague Castle. Thurn and his companions were not fools. They had real grievances: guarantees broken, churches torn down, a new king openly hostile to their faith. They believed, not unreasonably, that the regents were enemies of their liberties. What they wanted was to force the question.

They got their wish. That is the lesson of the window. A spectacular act meant to settle a dispute usually just ends the chance of settling it, and once the violence starts, it rarely stays the size of the original quarrel. The Defenestration of Prague was designed to make retreat impossible, and it did exactly that, for everyone. It locked the Bohemian nobles into a rebellion they could not win. It gave Ferdinand the justification he needed to crush them. And it opened a door through which Denmark, Sweden, France and Spain walked in turn, each with its own ambitions and none with any interest in the fate of a few Protestant churches in Broumov and Hrob.

No one in the chancellery that morning imagined Magdeburg in flames, or the plague pits of the 1630s, or Swedish soldiers fighting on the Charles Bridge thirty years later. People who choose the dramatic gesture rarely imagine where it will lead. They imagine the moment itself: the gasp in the room, the humiliation of their enemy, the point made beyond argument. What they do not imagine is that the other side, too, has allies, grievances and a capacity for escalation, and that the conflict they have set loose will soon be steered by people with entirely different aims.

The three men who went out of the window that day survived, which is perhaps the cruellest irony of all. Martinice and Slavata both lived for decades afterwards, long enough to see the war through to its end. Fabricius got a title out of it. The people who paid for that morning in Prague were almost entirely people who had never been in the room, and who had never been asked.

So by all means, argue. Petition. Protest. But if you find yourself in a room where the argument has turned into a plan, and the plan involves a window, it is worth pausing to ask what comes after the fall. Prague did not ask in 1419. It did not ask in 1618. Europe spent the next thirty years answering.

Further Reading

•       Peter H. Wilson, Europe's Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War (Allen Lane, 2009). The definitive modern history, published in the US as The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy.

•       C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (1938). Dated in places, but still one of the most vivid narrative histories of the war.

•       Geoffrey Parker (ed.), The Thirty Years' War (Routledge, 2nd edn, 1997). A clear, authoritative overview by several leading historians.

•       Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2013). Places the war within the wider crisis of the Little Ice Age.

•       Derek Croxton, Westphalia: The Last Christian Peace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). A detailed account of the negotiations at Münster and Osnabrück.

•       Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus (1668). The war as experienced from the ground, by a writer who lived through it.