Prague Revisited
The article that follows was published by Hungarian Review in two parts. Part 1 was published in its November 2018 issue and Part 2 in January 2019. Four hundred years ago, on 23 May 1618, three men were thrown from a window in Prague Castle . Until moments before their defenestration they had been working in the Old Royal Palace , in the Catholic administration of the Habsburg Emperor. Those who threw them out of the window were members of the Bohemian Estates - the parliament of the day - Protestants increasingly concerned by the persecution of their fellow Protestants throughout Habsburg realms, and the erosion of religious and political liberties in Bohemia. Historians have taken the 1618 Defenestration of Prague as marking the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, a conflict that raged ferociously, mostly across Bohemia and other parts of the Holy Roman Empire , from 1618 to 1648, drawing in the armies of most of the European powers of the time. It was the