The Strange and Disturbing History of Defenestration
The act of throwing someone through a window
Defenestration is the act of throwing someone out of or through a window. It is a strangely elaborate and beautiful word for such a brutal act, but the truth is that people across the globe have been throwing each other through windows for centuries. Whether it is part of a popular revolution, a way of getting rid of a rival, or a darkly comic mistake; be they queens, generals, or attorneys, this inventive way of killing or injuring someone has a surprisingly rich and often significant history.
Earliest Records
The earliest recorded defenestration is found in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, and has been dated to c.842 BCE. Jezebel was the daughter of the King of Tyre and became Queen of Israel by marrying King Ahab. Attempting to install the gods of her home country, Jezebel purged all the prophets of Yahweh, the Hebrew God, from Israel. These included the prophet Elijah, leader of the Israelites, who in turn ordered the people to kill the prophets of Baal and Asherah, with Jezebel replying with a promise that he would end up dead like the other Yahwist prophets or she would accept divine judgment for failing.
Sure enough, Elijah was killed and was believed to have been assumed into heaven on a chariot of fire. Soon after, King Ahab died in battle and was succeeded by his sons Ahaziah and Joram. The prophet Elisha, the successor to Elijah, commanded his followers to purge the heretical House of Omri and anoint Jehu as king.
Jehu murdered Joram and then proceeded to the palace at Jezreel, where Jezebel sought to distract him by putting on make-up and a wig to seduce him. Instead, Jehu ordered Jezebel’s eunuch servants to throw her from her window, where her corpse was trampled on by Jehu’s horses. Just as Elijah had prophesied, all that was left of Jezebel was her skull, feet, and palms. The rest of her had been eaten by wild dogs.
Royal Defenestrations
Whilst the story of Jezebel is open to religious interpretation and myth-making, other examples of royalty suffering or ordering defenestration are available. Indeed, ordering someone thrown through a window was a quick and easy way to be rid of a potential rival for medieval kings.
According to some chronicles, especially the Annals of Westhide, King John of England defenestrated his own nephew, Arthur of Brittany, in 1203. Arthur was the son of John’s older brother, Geoffrey, and had been named heir to England by John’s other brother, Richard the Lionheart. Upon Richard’s death in 1199, John became King of England, but his French barons preferred Arthur. Arthur joined forces with King Philip II of France and together they invaded John’s territories in France.
They were unsuccessful and Arthur was imprisoned in Rouen by his uncle in 1203. After that, Arthur disappeared, but many believe he was murdered on the orders of King John, with numerous chronicles recording how uncle John killed Arthur with his own hands before throwing him through a window of Rouen Castle into the River Seine.
Scotland’s kings seemed no better than their neighbours. In the mid-fifteenth century, William, 8th Earl of Douglas, was the most powerful lord in southern Scotland. Alongside being Earl of Douglas, he also gained the lordships of Bothwell and Galloway through marriage, granting him huge riches and influence, but also branding him a very real rival to the crown.
In February 1452, Douglas was summoned to Stirling Castle by King James II. Upon arrival, King James demanded Douglas dissolve a powerful league he had entered into with the Earls of Crawford and Ross which posed a very great threat to his royal authority. According to the Auchinleck Chronicle, when Douglas refused the king’s order, the king and his attendants stabbed him whilst Sir Patrick Gray ‘struck out his brains with a pole axe’, all before throwing his body through one of Stirling Castle’s windows.
Whilst both John’s and James’s victims were already dead when they were defenestrated, the same could not be said for General Adham Khan. Khan was the adoptive brother to the sixteenth-century Mughal Emperor, Akbar the Great. An accomplished general, Khan’s great victory came in 1561 when he conquered the west-central Indian region of Malwa; but he displeased his Emperor by keeping most of the spoils, sending Akbar only a few horses. As punishment, Akbar promoted Khan’s rival general, Ataga Khan, to wakil (Prime Minister) of the empire.
On 6 May 1562, Khan and a few followers stormed into the audience chamber of the royal fort at Agra and murdered Ataga Khan. Khan then rushed into the inner apartments, only to find Emperor Akbar, who had been woken by the skirmish. After hearing what had happened, Akbar himself punched Khan and ordered his immediate defenestration. Adham was thrown forty feet from the roof of Agra Fort but only broke his legs. Undeterred, Akbar ordered he be carried up and thrown again, which naturally finished the job. To date, this remains the only example of a double defenestration.
However, kings and rulers could also be on the other side of the window too. Few modern European monarchs had such a bad relationship with their subjects as Alexander I, King of Serbia from 1889 to 1903. He displeased his army, government, and the public in 1900 when he married the unpopular Draga Mašin, a renowned and infertile philanderer; both the general of his forces and his prime minister resigned.
In 1901, he personally introduced a new liberal Serbian constitution, only to proceed to hate it and even suspend it for half an hour in March 1903 to decree the replacement of certain senators and councillors. Meanwhile, the army grew weary of a rumour that the childless couple were naming Dragda’s unpopular brother, Lieutenant Nikodije, heir to the throne.
Accordingly, in June 1903, a troop of Royal Serbian Army officers, led by Captain Dragutin Dimitrijević and Novak Perisic (leader of the Black Hand group that would assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914), surrounded the royal palace. Alexander and Draga were forced to hide in a wardrobe in the queen’s bedroom, where they were found on the morning of 11 June by soldiers searching the palace. The king and queen were shot and their corpses mutilated before being stripped naked and thrown through the bedroom window onto piles of manure. Alexander was only 26.
Popular Uprisings
Rulers weren’t the only ones who saw defenestration as a way of removing unwanted politicians and rivals, throwing people out of windows was often a familiar sight during public uprisings or protests.
In 1378, the craftsmen of the Flemish city of Leuven rose up against the city’s patrician rulers and occupied the town hall. Most of the patricians fled to Aarschot, where they negotiated the surrender of their absolute power and brokered a deal with Leuven’s craftsmen and guilds. But the peace did not last, and in an attempt to regain power and influence the patricians ordered the assassination of the leader of the craftsmen, Wouter Van Der Leyden, in Brussels. Demanding revenge, Leuven’s craftsmen abandoned their traitorous new allies to the fury of the city’s population. A crowd once again stormed the city hall and some fifteen patricians were promptly launched from the building’s windows.
A defenestration could also mark the beginning of a popular uprising, as was the case in Paris in August 1572. France had seen decades of religious war and turmoil between its catholic and protestant populations, but an uneasy truce had been arranged under the reign of King Charles IX. Admiral Gaspard de Coligny was the leader of the Huguenots (French protestants) and was a great friend and advisor to King Charles. He was not, however, a friend of Charles’s mother, Catherine de Medici, who was committed to purging Protestantism from France.
On the morning of 24 August 1572, de Coligny was dragged from his bed by a group led by Henry, Duke of Guise and leader of the Catholic League; he was stabbed by a servant named Charles Danowitz and tossed through the window. When he reached the ground another servant chopped his head off. De Coligny’s defenestration began a slaughtering of protestants across France known as the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, where around 70,000 protestants are believed to have been killed, most likely organised by Catherine de Medici. Many illustrations of the massacre include de Coligny being thrown from the window and his severed head was sent to Pope Gregory XIII in Rome as a gift, but it was lost before it left France.
The Defenestrations of Prague
There is one place that truly deserves the epithet of the spiritual home of defenestration, the Czech (though in these cases Bohemian) capitol city of Prague, which has seen four defenestrations in its history.
The First Defenestration of Prague occurred in 1419. Early fifteenth-century Prague was a hotbed of discontent at the direction of the church and the inequality between the church and nobility against the peasants. This discontent was stirred up further by the pre-Reformation, proto-Protestant teachings of the Hussite movement, which was gaining huge popularity within Bohemia and threatening the Catholic spirit of the Holy Roman Empire.
On 30 July, Jan Želivský, a Hussite priest, led his congregation on a march to Prague town hall to request the release of Hussite prisoners. Upon arrival, a stone was thrown from one of the town hall windows which supposedly hit Želivský. Enraged, the congregation stormed the town hall and defenestrated the judge, burgomaster (chief magistrate), and several council members through the hall’s windows, killing them.
King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia actually died from shock at the news and the defenestration led to the Hussite Wars between Bohemia’s Hussites and the Empire’s Catholics which lasted twenty-five years.
Even after the Hussite Wars, Prague remained a site of contention between Catholics and Hussites, and 1483 saw a second round of defenestrations, though they are strangely not regarded as the Second Defenestration of Prague. Bohemia’s king, Vladislaus II, was attempting to re-catholicise the country, leading to a long period of discontent and ‘storms’.
On 24 September 1483, a party of the ‘Communion Under Both Kinds’ (a proto-protestant group that believed one had to take both the bread and wine to receive full holy communion) staged a coup in all three municipalities of Prague: the Old Town, the New Town, and the Lesser Town.
The burgomaster of the Old Town was thrown through a window of his town hall, whilst the bodies of seven New Town councillors were thrown from the windows of theirs. The mass defenestration led to all three municipalities accepting the group’s terms and would lead to a reconciliation between the Hussites and the Catholics.
The Big One: the Second Defenestration of Prague
But it was Prague’s third defenestration, confusingly called the Second Defenestration of Prague, in 1618 that is perhaps the most famous, if not the most important, defenestration in history.
The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 had solved the Holy Roman Empire’s empire’s Catholic-Protestant religious deadlock by creating the principle of cuius regio, eius regio, meaning the religion of a ruler was the religion of his people. Bohemia itself was majority protestant but ruled by the Catholic Habsburgs. But religious tolerance was practised and in 1609 the King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, had granted a ‘Letter of Majesty’ which granted Bohemia’s protestants the right to freely exercise their religion and build churches, upheld by his successor, Emperor Matthias.
But tolerance was certainly not practised by Matthias’s cousin and heir, Ferdinand of Styria. Whilst Bohemia’s crown was supposedly elective, for years it had been the Habsburg Imperial heir who had been ‘elected’. Accordingly, in 1617, the devoutly catholic Ferdinand elected as king of devoutly protestant Bohemia. Almost immediately, Ferdinand stopped the building of Protestant churches and restricted the parameters of Rudolf’s Letter of Majesty; when the Bohemian estates protested, Ferdinand dissolved their assembly.
Whilst Ferdinand was King of Bohemia, he left the actual ruling of his kingdom to four Catholic regents. On the morning of 23 May 1618, the four regents arrived at Prague Castle to meet with a delegation of Bohemia’s protestant lords, led by Count von Thurn. The lords demanded to know which of the regents was responsible for persuading Ferdinand’s order to cease the construction of Protestant churches.
Demanding an immediate answer, the lords declared two of the regents innocent and they were removed from the room. The remaining regents, Count Vilem Slavata of Chlum and Count Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice acknowledged responsibility, assuming they would only be arrested. However, Count von Thurn proclaimed to his fellow Protestants, “were we to keep these men alive, then we would lose the Letter of Majesty and our religion”. The two regents and their secretary were then thrown from the third-floor window of Prague Castle and fell seventy feet, surviving only by landing on a dung heap.
Within days, the Protestant lords elected the Calvinist Frederick V of the Palatinate as the new King of Bohemia whilst Ferdinand was elected Holy Roman Emperor. The religious and political ramifications of the Second Defenestration would lead to the Thirty Year War, which dramatically changed the map and politics of Europe forever. Indeed, the incident was so important that it actually led to the coining of the word ‘defenestration’.
Modern Defenestrations
Defenestration is not something confined to the pre-modern era, however. Unfortunately, people were throwing each other out of windows long into the twentieth century, and usually for the same political or Machiavellian reasons as before.
Jan Masaryk was a foreign minister of Czechoslovakia following the country’s liberation in 1945 under a National Front government. Despite not being a communist himself, he remained in office after the ‘Czech Coup’ of February 1948, when Klement Gottwald created a communist state with the help of the Soviet Union. But the ‘coup’ crossed a line for Masaryk, who gave radio broadcasts and wrote papers emphasising his regret at not stopping the communist coup or joining the Eastern Bloc.
On 10 March 1948, Masaryk was found dead in his pyjamas below his bathroom window at Foreign Ministry in Prague (yeah, there again). The Czech government immediately ruled it as suicide, but from the start, there were accusations he had been defenestrated.
During the Prague Spring of 1968 (when citizens of Prague unsuccessfully rose up against communist rule), Masaryk’s death was changed to an accident; later, during the successful Velvet Revolution in 1990, it was changed again to murder. Masaryk’s death was later called the -Third Defenestration of Prague’ and in 2004 a police report concluded that Masaryk was indeed thrown through the window, most likely by the communists and their NKVD advisors.
Sometimes the victims of defenestration have the last laugh, however. In 1966, Chairman Mao, the Paramount Leader of Communist China, launched the Cultural Revolution. It aimed to purge bourgeois and traditional elements of Chinese society and conscripted thousands of students into humiliating, torturing, and murdering anyone accused of capitalist thinking.
Millions of people died between 1966 and 1977, including Mao’s great economist minister, Deng Xiaoping. Deng was branded a bourgeois capitalist and forced by students to confess to capitalist ways of thinking. The Red Guard then imprisoned Deng’s son, Deng Pufang, tortured him, and then threw him from a third-floor window of Peking University in 1968. His back was broken but he was refused entry into a hospital, leaving him paralysed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair.
However, following Mao’s death in 1976 and the end of the Cultural Revolution a year later, Deng Xiaoping rose up to become Paramount Leader of China, whilst Pufang became one of the world’s leading disability activists, creating the China Disabled Person’s Federation in 1988 and leading the movement to have mental illness recognised as a disability in China in 1991.
Comic Defenestrations
Whilst the thought of someone falling through a window and plummeting to their death or serious injury is horrific, there are some instances that cannot help but make us laugh or smile, however dark the incident actually was.
Garry How was a successful Toronto attorney at the great Canadian legal firm, Holden Day Wilson. Working at the Toronto-Dominion Centre, How particularly enjoyed demonstrating how strong the windows of the offices were to interns and new-starters when giving them tours by throwing himself against the glass and bouncing back. On 9 July 1993, How was showing a group of prospective articling students around the twenty-fourth floor when he decided to perform his usual routine.
On his first demonstration, Hoy bounced back as usual; on his second, however, the force of his body caused the glass, not to shatter, but for the whole pane to pop out of its frame, plummeting How 300 feet to his death. The self-defenestration of one of its prominent lawyers led to the dissolution of Holden Day Wilson in 1996 and How was presented that same year with a Darwin Award, a satirical honour given to those who have contributed to human evolution by expiring in darkly humorous ways.
On 26 October 1997, NBA basketball player Charles Barkley was on a visit to Orlando, Florida whilst playing for the Houston Jets. Whilst at Phineas Phoggs bar in Church Street Station, Barkley was confronted by a 20-year-old construction worker named Jorge Lugo. Facing a six-foot six opponent, there was little Lugo could do but throw a cup of ice at Barkley. At this, Barkley picked up Lugo and threw him through one of the bar’s glass windows. Whilst Lugo survived (it was only a ground floor window) an off-duty policeman in the bar at the time arrested Barkley and he was bailed out of jail by a fellow player. However, Lugo did not press charges of aggravated battery and Barkley’s only punishment was paying $320 to repair the window.
So, whether it's through political necessity, as part of a civilian uprising, or completely by accident; be they kings, lords, students or construction workers, mankind cannot seem to stop throwing one another out of windows. Indeed, perhaps such a rich and extravagant (and sometimes disturbing) history permits the act of throwing someone out of a window to have such an extravagant name as defenestration.
