It might have been downright funny . . . if it hadn’t started a war.
In May of 1618, three men were hurled out a high window of Hradcany Castle in Prague. Instead of being killed or badly hurt, they landed in a dung heap that cushioned their fall. They took to their heels and scampered off, their pride being the only thing seriously injured.
The event sounds almost comical, but it proved to have tragic results.
The men were official representatives of the Roman Catholic Hapsburg emperor. An enraged crowd of Protestant nobles had thrown them out the window to protest the closing of several protestant churches. This act of rebellion outraged the emperor, and triggered a war.
It began as a struggle between Catholics and Protestants in Bohemia. Soon Austria got involved, then Denmark and Sweden. Shortly thereafter, Poland, France, and the Netherlands joined in. The scandal in Bohemia had exploded into a seemingly endless conflict that engulfed much of Europe: the Thirty Years’ War.
Ten million people would die in the war, more than a quarter of the population of Central Europe. When it was over, the authority of the Roman Catholic Church was dealt a major blow. What emerged from the war was a Europe filled with sovereign states that could choose their own religions . . . the Europe we still know today.
The incident became known as the “Defenestration of Prague”—defenestration being a fancy word for throwing someone out the window. It has a history in Prague. Two hundred years before this defenestration, several town councillors were thrown out the window of Prague City Hall, an event that sparked a war of its own.
When a peace conference was finally called to end the war, it required six months of negotiations just to agree on where everyone would sit. After another year of discussions, the Treaty of Westphalia was signed.
The men were thrown out of the middle set of windows. The monument below marks where they landed. They claimed the Virgin Mary had magically appeared to cushion their fall, but onlookers said it was manure piled up in what was at that time the castle moat.