The Word Born From Throwing Men Out Windows

The English language contains a word — “defenestration” — that means the act of throwing a person out of a window. It exists because Prague, more than once, made window‑throwing its preferred way of settling political arguments.

It happened at least three times in Bohemian history. The third time helped start a war that killed around eight million people.

The Horror

On 23 May 1618, a group of Protestant Bohemian nobles marched into the royal offices at Prague Castle to confront the Catholic imperial governors who were enforcing the Habsburg emperor’s hard line on religion. The meeting went badly. Voices rose. Threats were exchanged.

Then the Protestants seized two senior royal officials — Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice and Vilém Slavata of Chlum — along with their secretary, Filip Fabricius. Dragging them across the room to a tall window in the Bohemian Chancellery, they forced it open and, one by one, hurled all three men out. The drop from the third floor to the dry moat below was roughly 20 metres — about 70 feet.

All three survived.

Within hours, Catholic writers were proclaiming a miracle. Pamphlets and sermons across Catholic Europe claimed that angels, or the Virgin Mary herself, had caught the men in mid‑air and lowered them gently to the ground. Their survival was presented as proof that God favoured the Catholic cause in Bohemia.

The Protestant version was less celestial and more earthy. They pointed out that the moat beneath the window was not a bare stone pit but a dumping ground for rubbish and stable waste. A deep layer of horse manure and refuse had built up below the wall, forming a foul, springy cushion that broke the men’s fall. No angels. Just dung.

Filip Fabricius — the secretary — did well out of his plunge. The emperor ennobled him with a new title: von Hohenfall, “of the High Fall,” and granted him a coat of arms that commemorated his survival. The man thrown from a window ended up with a name that forever reminded everyone he had been thrown from a window.

The defenestration did not end in the moat. It set off the Bohemian Revolt, as Protestant estates refused to recognise the emperor’s authority and raised their own forces. That revolt widened into the Thirty Years’ War, which raged from 1618 to 1648, drawing in most of the major European powers. Entire regions of Central Europe, especially parts of the German states, lost a quarter to a third of their population. Famine, disease and massacres followed armies across the continent.

Three men thrown from a window into a heap of manure. A quarrel over whether they were saved by angels or by dung. Eight million dead before the peace was signed.

The Modern Relic

The window is still there. It is in the old Bohemian Chancellery wing of Prague Castle, now part of the complex that houses the offices of the Czech president. A small plaque marks the site; guides point it out on castle tours. Visitors stroll past it on their way to St Vitus Cathedral and the panoramic views over the city.

The moat below is clean now — grass, paths, and stone, not a reeking dump of stable waste. There is no marker for the manure.

The word “defenestration” remains in dictionaries in English and other European languages, a permanent reminder that sometimes a city’s political style leaves a trace not just in stone, but in vocabulary. Most people who use it today think it is a quirky term for throwing someone or something out of a window. In Prague, it is also the name of a moment when an empty frame overlooking a moat helped push Europe into its bloodiest war before the twentieth century.

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