Why throwing politicians out of windows was used to solve European conflicts 500 years ago

In the early 15th century, the Kingdom of Bohemia was gripped by a crisis of faith and power.

The death of King Wenceslaus IV in 1419 followed years of religious unrest caused by the execution of reformer Jan Hus in 1415.

Hus, who had been excommunicated in 1411 and burned at the stake at the Council of Constance despite being promised safe conduct, had called for wide-ranging changes to the Catholic Church and gained common support among the Czech population.

His death angered the Hussites, a reform movement that grew more unfriendly to the Catholic clergy and nobility who supported papal control and German influence in Bohemian affairs.

As tensions grew between Hussite reformers and Catholic loyalists, the Bohemian court found itself deadlocked by internal fights. 

Political authority in Prague during this time became divided. The nobility, royal administrators, and church officials all claimed the right to govern.

Religious complaints merged with ethnic and national identity, as many Czechs resented the control of German-speaking elites.

Power struggles were fought using sermons and pamphlets, and they also turned to force, and the city of Prague became a powder keg.

By 1419, calls for reform had turned into threats of violence, and the first defenestration would come as a shocking but calculated act of political provocation. 

On 30 July 1419, tensions reached a breaking point. Jan Želivský, a radical Hussite priest, led a march of followers through the streets of Prague towards the New Town Hall.

The protesters demanded the release of several Hussite prisoners. When the town councillors refused, the crowd stormed the building, encouraged by Želivský’s sermon and a hail of stones supposedly thrown from the windows, the mob burst into the council chamber. 

The result was horrific. Several city officials, who were the judge, the burgomaster and members of the town council, were grabbed and thrown out of the upper windows of the hall.

The fall to the street below proved fatal, but those who survived the drop were killed by the armed mob, which waited outside.

This First Defenestration of Prague was not an act of spontaneous rage. It was a planned demonstration of political power and a clear threat to the existing authority.

The message was clear: resistance to reform would be met with violence. 

The immediate results of the First Defenestration were dramatic. King Wenceslaus IV, who had already suffered several strokes, died shortly after receiving news of the killings.

While some chroniclers claimed it was from shock, the precise cause of death is uncertain.

His death created a gap in leadership in Bohemia, and this threw the kingdom into chaos.

Hussite extremists took control of Prague, while the Catholic nobility and church authorities gathered in opposition.

Attempts to restore royal control failed as towns and noble houses across Bohemia chose sides.

Sigismund of Luxembourg, Wenceslaus’s brother, claimed the throne, but he was widely despised by the Hussites for his role in Hus's execution and his alliance with the papacy. 

This collapse led directly to the Hussite Wars, a series of brutal conflicts that lasted from 1419 to 1434.

The wars saw the use of new tactics, such as war wagons and religiously motivated peasant armies that challenged the established military order of Europe.

Jan Žižka, a one-eyed general and master of mobile defences, led Hussite forces to a string of surprising victories.

The Hussites proved remarkably effective in battle, and they defeated several crusades that the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor sent against them.

The First Defenestration started a civil war in Bohemia, and forced the Catholic Church and imperial powers to confront a radical new threat to their authority. 

By the mid-15th century, Bohemia stayed unstable. After the Hussite Wars ended, power was divided between moderate Hussites, known as Utraquists, and Catholic nobles.

Though the Compactata of Basel, officially approved at the Diet of Iglau in 1436, had temporarily recognised some Hussite religious practices, tensions between Protestant and Catholic factions never fully eased.

During the reign of Vladislaus II of the Jagiellonian dynasty, attempts to balance competing factions were only partly successful.

In 1483, fears of a Catholic plot to purge Prague’s city government triggered a second violent upheaval. 

On the night of 24 September 1483, Utraquist supporters stormed the Old Town and New Town halls in a planned attack.

Once again, city councillors were thrown out of windows. The violence quickly spread, and the next morning the attackers had seized control of Prague.

This Second Defenestration was not as widely publicised as the first, but it reinforced the idea that political disputes in Bohemia could be resolved through deadly public gestures.

The attackers justified the killings as preventive attacks to prevent the loss of religious freedom. 

The aftermath of the 1483 defenestrations resulted in a weak peace deal. The Prague religious factions signed an agreement to maintain balance and limit outside interference, but mistrust remained.

Power was still disputed, and many viewed defenestration as an acceptable option when legal authority failed.

The example set in 1419 had become a part of political practice, especially during moments of crisis in the country. 

By the early 17th century, the Habsburg rulers of the Holy Roman Empire were determined to reassert Catholic control across their territories.

In Bohemia, Protestant rights had been granted under the Letter of Majesty in 1609, but those rights came under threat after Ferdinand II, a staunch Catholic educated by Jesuits and committed to the Counter-Reformation, was named King of Bohemia in 1617.

Protestant nobles feared they would lose their religious freedoms, especially when Catholic officials began closing Protestant chapels. 

On 23 May 1618, Protestant nobles in Prague confronted two royal governors, Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice and Vilém Slavata of Chlum, at the Bohemian Chancellery in the Prague Castle.

The Protestants accused them of violating the Letter of Majesty and, without any legal trial or warning, seized them.

In a now infamous moment, they threw both men and their secretary out of a third-floor window, from a height often cited as approximately 21 metres, though the exact measurement is debated.

Miraculously, all three survived—a fact often attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to their landing on a pile of manure; the insult to imperial power was unmistakable. 

The Third Defenestration triggered a crisis that soon engulfed much of Europe. In the weeks that followed, the Protestant estates in Bohemia raised troops and declared open rebellion against the Habsburgs.

Ferdinand II, now Holy Roman Emperor, responded with force. The Bohemian Revolt marked the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, a catastrophic conflict that would devastate much of central Europe between 1618 and 1648. 

The war quickly expanded beyond Bohemia. Protestant and Catholic states throughout the empire, along with foreign powers such as Sweden, France, and Spain, entered the conflict.

The causes of the war were complicated, but the events in Prague were the immediate spark.

What had begun as a local protest over religious rights became a continental war that killed between four and eight million people, displaced entire populations, and permanently changed the balance of power in Europe.

The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, would eventually bring the war to a close, redrawing boundaries and changing the nature of state sovereignty.

All of it had been set in motion by the act of throwing men out of a window.