The Two Catholic Imperial Governors Thrown Out of a Hradčany Castle Window on 23 May 1618 That Started the Thirty Years War

The kingdom of Bohemia had been a Habsburg crown possession since 1526 and a confessionally mixed territory since the Hussite reformation of the 15th century. The 1609 Letter of Majesty granted by Emperor Rudolf II had guaranteed Bohemian Protestants the legal right to build new churches on royal land. By 1617 his successor Ferdinand II — a Counter-Reformation hardliner educated by Jesuits at Ingolstadt — had begun to retract the concession.

Two Protestant church buildings had been closed by imperial order in 1617. The Bohemian Protestant Estates convened on 22 May 1618 at the Old Town Hall and resolved to confront the senior Catholic imperial officials in Prague the next morning.

23 May 1618

The Protestant delegation, approximately 100 men led by Count Heinrich Matthias von Thurn, walked from the Old Town across the Charles Bridge to the Hradčany Castle at about 9 a.m. on 23 May 1618. They entered the Chancellery on the castle’s third floor and found two of the imperial regents — Vilém Slavata of Chlum and Jaroslav Borzita of Martinice — together with the imperial secretary Philip Fabricius and three other officials.

Thurn read out a formal accusation. The two regents were specifically charged with having drafted the order to close the Protestant churches. The accusation was, in 17th-century Bohemian legal practice, a capital one.

After a brief discussion among the delegation the two regents were physically picked up and thrown out the eastward window of the Chancellery into the castle moat below. The secretary Fabricius was thrown out after them. The fall was approximately 21 metres (70 feet).

All three survived. Slavata had several broken ribs. Martinice had a broken leg. Fabricius was largely unhurt. The three crawled, ran, or were carried out of the moat and reached safety with sympathetic Catholic families in the Old Town within an hour. Fabricius was given an imperial title — Freiherr von Hohenfall (“Baron of High-Fall”) — by Ferdinand II as a joke at the Protestants’ expense.

What saved them

The Catholic political position, articulated by the imperial court within a week, was that the three had been saved by the direct intervention of the Virgin Mary, who had caught them in mid-air and softened their landing. The miraculous-rescue narrative was politically valuable; it positioned Catholic survival as a divine sign of the rightness of the Habsburg-Counter-Reformation cause.

The Protestant counter-narrative — printed in Lutheran pamphlets within weeks — was that the three had landed in a substantial accumulated heap of manure on the bank of the moat, which had absorbed the fall energy. Modern reconstruction of the castle moat in May 1618 supports the manure-heap reading. The castle had a stable complex above the eastern moat that produced regular dung deposit; the moat at the relevant location was largely dry; the dung was wet (May is a rainy month in Prague) and would have absorbed considerable impact.

Both political narratives — the Catholic miracle and the Protestant dung — were politically useful. Neither party had reason to argue against the other’s preferred explanation.

What followed

The defenestration was the formal repudiation of Habsburg authority by the Bohemian Estates. By the end of summer 1618 the Bohemian Protestants had elected the Calvinist Elector Palatine Frederick V as their alternative king. Ferdinand II — who had been elected Holy Roman Emperor on 28 August 1619 — invaded Bohemia within weeks.

The decisive engagement was the Battle of White Mountain outside Prague on 8 November 1620. The Bohemian Protestant army was destroyed in approximately two hours. Frederick V fled to the Netherlands and became, in subsequent contemporary chronicle, “the Winter King” — for the single winter that had constituted his Bohemian reign. The Bohemian Protestant aristocracy was systematically destroyed over the following decade — twenty-seven senior nobles were beheaded in the Old Town Square on 21 June 1621, and approximately 80 percent of the Bohemian nobility’s land was confiscated by 1628 and redistributed to Catholic loyalists.

The local Bohemian war had become, by 1625, a continental religious-political war that drew in Denmark (1625), Sweden (1630), Spain, France (1635), and most of the smaller German states. The fighting continued until the Peace of Westphalia of 24 October 1648. The death toll across the Holy Roman Empire is estimated at approximately 8 million — about 20 percent of the central European population. Some German regions lost over half their population to the combination of direct combat, famine, and plague.

The Thirty Years War was started by three men being thrown out of a third-floor window into a manure heap. They had all survived the fall. The 8 million who died over the subsequent thirty years had not been so lucky.