On the morning of 23 May 1618, the Bohemian Chancellery in Prague was prepared for a formal meeting. But outside its windows, Europe itself was poised on a precipice. Within hours, three men would plunge from a third-floor window—and the continent would slide into the Thirty Years’ War.
A Fragile Religious Settlement
For decades, the Holy Roman Empire had tried to live with its religious fractures. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 had allowed each prince to choose the religion of his territory—Cuius regio, eius religio. Bohemia, ruled by Habsburg kings since 1526, was largely Protestant, but its Catholic rulers had mostly tolerated that reality.
Rudolf II, emperor and King of Bohemia, had even strengthened Protestant rights. In 1609 he issued the Letter of Majesty, granting Bohemia’s estates the freedom to exercise their religion and effectively creating a Protestant state church dominated by towns and rural nobles.
But the balance was fragile and personal. Rudolf’s perceived unfitness led his family to push him aside in favour of his brother Matthias. With Matthias came new calculations, new advisers, and eventually a new heir: Ferdinand of Styria, a staunch supporter of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
From Legal Dispute to Showdown
Bohemian Protestants believed the Letter of Majesty applied everywhere in the kingdom—including lands held directly by the king. Ferdinand did not agree. In 1618 he succeeded in having the emperor order Protestant chapels on royal land closed, and when the Bohemian estates protested, their assembly was dissolved.
Resentment hardened into defiance. When four Catholic lords regent arrived at the Chancellery on that May morning, they walked into a chamber filled with angry Protestant estate holders, led by Count Thurn, who had already lost his post as castellan of Karlštejn Castle.
The Fall
The Protestant nobles demanded to know who was responsible for a sharp imperial letter that had declared their lives and honour forfeit. A tense exchange followed. Two regents, deemed too pious to be conspirators, were allowed to leave. Three men remained: Counts Vilém Slavata and Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice, both seen as Catholic hard-liners, and their secretary, Philip Fabricius.
Thurn’s words were a verdict: these men were enemies of their religion and their rights. Keeping them alive, he warned, meant the loss of the Letter of Majesty itself. Moments later, the regents and Fabricius were seized and hurled from a 70-foot window.
They survived.
Angels or Dung Heaps?
Catholics claimed angels—or the Virgin Mary herself—had intervened. Protestants later scoffed that a dung heap had broken their fall, mocking the miracle story. Whatever the truth of what lay beneath that window, the political impact was clear.
From Prague to Continental War
In the immediate aftermath, both Protestant estates and Catholic Habsburgs scrambled for allies. When Matthias died in 1619, Ferdinand II became emperor—but Bohemia rejected him as king, choosing instead Frederick V, a leading Calvinist prince.
The move backfired. Having deposed a properly chosen king who was also emperor, the Bohemians found themselves isolated. At the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, Ferdinand’s forces crushed them in what became remembered as the first battle of the Thirty Years’ War—a conflict that would ravage Central Europe for decades.
It began, in the popular memory, not with a grand declaration or treaty, but with three men tumbling through the air above Prague, and a kingdom deciding that justice must be done through an open window.