page_title: Defenestrations of Prague
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Defenestrations of Prague / The Third Defenestration of Prague / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: The site of the second defenestration of Prague. The Catholic priests lived after being thrown out of the window, which was seen as divine intervention. It was said they landed in a pile of horse dung and rolled down the hill, which softened the landing. Notice the memorial to the right of the tower.
context_page_description: The Defenestrations of Prague were three incidents in the history of Bohemia in which multiple people were defenestrated. The origin of the word "defenestrate" is believed to come from the episodes in Prague in 1618 when the disgruntled Protestant estates threw two royal governors out of a window of the Hradčany Castle and wrote an extensive Apologia explaining their action. In the Middle Ages and early modern times, defenestrations were not uncommon--the act carried elements of lynching and mob violence in the form of murder committed together.
  The first governmental defenestration occurred in 1419, second in 1483 and the third in 1618, although the term "Defenestration of Prague" more commonly refers to the third. Often, however, the 1483 event does not count as a "significant defenestration", which leads to some ambiguity when the "second Prague defenestration" is referred to as the 1618 defenestration. The first and third defenestrations helped to trigger a prolonged religious conflict inside Bohemia or beyond, while the second helped establish a religious peace in the country for 31 years.
context_section_description: In 1555, the Peace of Augsburg had settled religious disputes in the Holy Roman Empire by enshrining the principle of Cuius regio, eius religio, allowing a prince to determine the religion of his subjects. The Kingdom of Bohemia since 1526 had been governed by Habsburg kings, who did not force their Catholic religion on their largely Protestant subjects. In 1609, Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia (1576–1612), increased Protestant rights. He was increasingly viewed as unfit to govern, and other members of the Habsburg dynasty declared his younger brother, Matthias, to be family head in 1606. Matthias began to gradually wrest territory from Rudolf, beginning with Hungary. In 1609, to strengthen his hold on Bohemia, Rudolf issued the Letter of Majesty, which granted Bohemia's largely Protestant estates the right to freely exercise their religion, essentially setting up a Protestant Bohemian state church controlled by the estates, "dominated by the towns and rural nobility". Upon Rudolf's death, Matthias succeeded in the rule of Bohemia (1612–1619) and extended his offer of more legal and religious concessions to Bohemia, relying mostly on the advice of his chancellor, Bishop Melchior Klesl.
  Conflict was precipitated by two factors: Matthias, already aging and without children, made his cousin Ferdinand of Styria his heir and had him elected king in 1617. Ferdinand  was a proponent of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and not likely to be well-disposed to Protestantism or Bohemian freedoms. Bohemian Protestants opposed the royal government as they interpreted the Letter of Majesty to extend not only to the land controlled by the nobility or self-governing towns but also to the King's own lands.  Whereas Matthias and Klesl were prepared to appease these demands, Ferdinand was not; in 1618 he forced the Emperor to order the cessation of construction of some Protestant chapels on royal land. When the Bohemian estates protested against this order, Ferdinand had their assembly dissolved.
caption: The window (top floor) where the third defenestration occurred. Note the monument to the right of the castle tower.
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