“DEFENESTRATION: Sales dive leads to turnover at the top,” the online headline said,
which prompted me to quiz my lovely and unsuspecting wife (who was also online at a
different computer in the same room). Reading the headline aloud, I asked: “What
does defenestration mean?” Her response: “It seems like I ought to know.”
So, now for her and the rest of my reading public, I present a tutorial on
defenestrations and their place in history. With the help of tens of thousands of
Wikipedia contributors, let me enlighten us all.
When I think defenestration, I think the Defenestration of Prague. There were, however,
two Defenestrations of Prague, not one as I had previously supposed, and neither led
to World War I, as I had thought. (The event I had conflated was probably the
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914.)
The Defenestrations of Prague were, in fact, two distinct incidents in the history of
Bohemia. (Right off, don’t you love any event in the history of Bohemia?) The first
occurred in 1419 and the second in 1618. The term “Defenestration of Prague” is more
commonly used to refer to the latter incident (the one which I remembered vaguely).
Both incidents helped to trigger prolonged conflict within Bohemia and beyond.
But before history, let’s do vocabulary. Defenestration is the act of throwing someone
out of a window. Etymologically it does not come directly from German (fenster:
window), as I errantly thought, but is from Latin (de: out of, with a downward motion
implied; fenestra: window).
The first Defenestration of Prague occurred on July 30, 1419 — and was not a lot of fun
as it involved the killing of seven members of the city council by a crowd of radical
Czech Hussites. It marked the turning point between talk and action leading to the
prolonged Hussite wars, which lasted until 1436. (Hussites, you may be interested to
know, are lineal predecessors of the Moravians who founded Old Salem and brought
us those really tasty thin sugar cookies and gooey sugar cakes.)
The second, more famous, Defenestration of Prague was initiated when some
members of the Bohemian aristocracy rebelled following the selection in 1617 of a
much earlier Ferdinand, the Catholic Duke of Styria, as King of Bohemia. On May 23,
1618, an assemblage of Protestants led by Count Thurn, whom the Emperor had
deprived of his post as Castellan (whatever that is) of Karlstadt, who reacting to an
inflammatory letter from the Emperor’s principal adviser, Bishop Klesl, exhorted his
followers to throw the Regents appointed by the Emperor out the window “as is
customary.” (Don’t you also love Bohemian customs?)
This group proceeded to bribe their way into the Prague Castle where the Regents
were meeting. Many present in the room later claimed that they thought the Regents
were only going to be arrested, saying by the time they realized what was happening, it
was too late to stop it. The two Regents, along with their secretary, Philip Fabricius,
were thrown out the third floor window. Falling almost 100 feet, the three landed,
happily, I guess, on a large pile of manure — and thus survived. (I am not making this
up.)
Fabricius, when later ennobled by the Emperor, was granted, apparently without
tongue in cheek, the title of Baron von Hohenfall (literally meaning “of high fall”).
Roman Catholic Imperial officials claimed that the three men survived due to the mercy
of angels assisting the righteousness of the Catholic cause. Protestant pamphleteers
asserted that their survival had more to do with the horse excrement in which they
landed than the benevolent acts of angels. In any case, the defenestration was central
to the start of the Thirty Years’ War.
For those few of you for whom this little history still does not make clear sense, but
who are up on their current events, just substitute Democrat for Catholic and
Republican for Protestant (or vice versa), it will all become perfectly obvious.
Gary D. Gaddy has walked across the Latin Bridge over the River Miljacka in Sarajevo,
Bosnia, near where the later Ferdinand was shot.
A version of this story was published in the Chapel Hill Herald on Friday April 2, 2010.
Copyright 2010 Gary D. Gaddy
garygaddy.com 