ABSTRACT
On 23 May 1618, a hundred Bohemian nobles climbed up the hill to the royal castle in Prague, which had been abandoned by the old emperor Matthias and his successor Ferdinand of Styria. They were the ‘Utraquist orders’ who had just convoked the ‘defenders of the faith’ instituted by the Letter of Majesty to regulate any confessional disputes that might arise in the kingdom of Bohemia. But the psychological climate had deteriorated since the election of Ferdinand II and the legal case which followed the construction of two Protestant churches on crown lands served to ignite the situation. The Protestant lords who had answered the appeal from the ‘defenders of the faith’ furiously blamed the lieutenancy council which was responsible for administering the kingdom in the king’s absence. Having exhausted their supply of arguments, they resorted to force and took hold of counts Martinic and Slavata, both Czech Catholic lords and members of the council, and threw them with a young secretary out of the window. This incident is known as the ‘Defenestration of Prague’.
