Crumbling Empires

Two Bold Acts of Defiance Against Imperial Power

This essay uses the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to paint a vivid portrait of the 1618 Defenestration of Prague. Though the 1914 event stemmed from ethnic tensions and the 1618 event from religious conflict, both events involved Slavic peoples rebelling against Germanic empires, and both precipitated major wars. The killing of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne started a chain reaction that led to the destruction of that Empire. The 1618 Defenestration of Prague was a revolt against the Holy Roman Empire that dealt a final blow to the old Medieval political order.

1914: Trouble in the Balkans

The 1914 assassination of Franz Ferdinand ultimately resulted in the horrors of World War I. He was heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was the personal empire of the House of Habsburg, the Viennese family that had also dominated the Holy Roman Empire for its last 400 years.

That empire had formally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina 6 years prior. This annexation infuriated the Kingdom of Serbia. From Belgrade's perspective, Vienna had stolen a territory full of Serbs who they believed should be united with Serbia. And so a shadowy Serbian nationalist group known as the “Black Hand” planned the assassination of the heir apparent.

On the morning of Sunday, June 28th, 1914, Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia. The perpetrator was 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, one of a group of assassins organized and armed by the Black Hand.

Initially, the assassination attempt had failed. But by an unbelievable stroke of happenstance, the Archduke’s car later stalled in front of a bar in which Gavrilo was hiding after the earlier attempt had failed. Princip stepped up to the open vehicle and fired two shots at point-blank range. Shortly thereafter, all of Europe plunged into WWI, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire ceased to exist within four short years.

1618: Trouble in Bohemia

The most significant difference between the 1618 Defenestration of Prague and the 1914 Assassination of Franz Ferdinand was that the former was the result of a religious conflict, rather than ethnic tensions. Prague was not only the capital city of the Czech state of Bohemia, but it had also occasionally served as the capital of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Czechs are Slavs, and they were subjects of that Germanic Empire. However, it was their desire to be ruled by Protestants instead of Catholics (not by Slavs instead of Germans) that animated their revolt against the medieval empire.

In 1618, the Holy Roman Empire was going through a succession crisis. The outgoing emperor had been tolerant of Protestantism, but the incoming emperor Ferdinand II was loyal to the Pope; he made no secret of his intention to crack down on Protestants. A bitter civil war was brewing. The northern half of the Holy Roman Empire, including Prague, wanted to adopt Protestantism, while the southern factions remained loyal to the Pope and Catholicism.

The German word “fenster” means “window”. It’s the root of the English word “defenestration”, which means throwing somebody out of a window. Over the centuries, defenestrations have become something of a tradition in the city of Prague.

The spark that ignited the Thirty Years’ War came when enraged Protestants marched into Prague Castle, seized two Catholic governors, and threw them out a second-story window. A clerk who got swept up in the frenzy was defenestrated along with them. In 1890, Czech artist Václav Brožík captured the drama of this moment in his painting, "The Defenestration of Prague, 1618." His work serves as the Title Card to this essay.

Amazingly, all three defenstrated men survived the fall, with only a broken leg among them. They tumbled fifty feet into a pile of horse manure. In the aftermath, printing presses saturated Europe with propaganda pamphlets. Catholic propaganda represented the cushioning feces as God’s salvation, while Protestant propaganda represented the same as the only treatment fit for Catholics.

1619-1648: The Thirty Years’ War

Jokes soon soured, and the mood in Europe darkened as war clouds gathered on the horizon. The Pope marshaled his political allies to support the emperor, while Protestant powers, such as Sweden, dispatched troops to support Protestant factions within the Holy Roman Empire.

Virtually every polity in Europe was dragged into the fighting. Because it considered the Holy Roman Empire an enemy, Catholic France entered the war on the side of the German Protestants. What started as a conflict over religious freedom descended into a bitter power struggle as the entire Medieval political paradigm descended into chaos. The falling dominoes that led to the catastrophe of the Thirty Years’ War would be mirrored 300 years later in the sequence of events that culminated in World War I.

Like WWI, the Thirty Years’ War caused significant loss of life, with estimates of casualties ranging from 4.5 to 8 million people. Many regions experienced extreme violence, famine, and disease. Cities and villages were looted and destroyed, leading to economic collapse and population displacement. The brutality of the war left deep scars on the European landscape and psyche, reshaping the continent's social, political, and economic structures. Simply put, the Thirty Years’ War was the ugliest, most brutal conflict to rack Europe until the outbreak of WWI 300 years later.

Conclusion

Unlike the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which didn’t survive WWI, the Holy Roman Empire endured the Thirty Years' War and lasted until Napoleon formally dissolved it in 1806 following the Battle of Austerlitz. It was the broader political order of the Middle Ages that was the casualty of the Thirty Years' War. The Treaty of Westphalia, which ended that war, established international borders and stipulated that the Vatican was not to cross these borders and interfere with states that wished to be Protestant. The modern political paradigm, consisting of sovereign nation-states, was born out of the Thirty Years’ War, a conflict which anticipated WWI in its ruinousness.

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But in Prague Count Heinrich von Thurn pleaded with the Protestant leaders to prevent the ardently Catholic Archduke Ferdinand from taking the throne of Bohemia. Emperor Matthias had left five deputy governors to administer the country during his absence. The governors overruled the Protestants in disputes about church building at Klostergrab, and sent the objectors to jail. On May 23, 1618, Thurn led a crowd of irate Protestants into Hradschin Castle, climbed to the rooms where two of the governors sat, and threw them out the window, along with a pleading secretary. All three fell fifty feet, but they landed in a heap of filth and escaped more soiled than injured. That famous ‘defenestration’ was a dramatic challenge to the Emperor, to the Archduke, and to the Catholic League. Thurn expelled the Archbishop and the Jesuits and formed a revolutionary Directory. He could hardly have realized that he had let loose the dogs of war.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Reason Begins, 1961, page 556