Defenestration as Ritual Punishment: Windows, Power, and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe
2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/690123
ISSN1537-5358
Autores Tópico(s)European history and politics
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeDefenestration as Ritual Punishment: Windows, Power, and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe*Daniel JütteDaniel JütteNew York University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreOne of the most cataclysmic wars in European history began at a window. On May 23, 1618, Bohemian insurgents pushed two imperial regents and a secretary out of a window of Prague Castle. This act spurred a chain reaction of military events that initially played out only on a local level but would soon prove consequential for all of Europe in what became known as the Thirty Years' War (1618–48).1 In the decades preceding the war, Europe was already riven with bitter religious controversies and battles for political supremacy. The Defenestration of Prague therefore was not the reason for the length of the war—but it was the spark that ignited the powder keg.Why exactly did the Bohemian Protestants decide to throw their imperial opponents out the window, of all things? Faced with this question, historians tend to offer relatively laconic answers. In popular accounts, the defenestration of 1618 is often portrayed as a protest that went out of control, or a case of mob justice.2 Some historians have even described it as a "comic accident" or as an anachronistic curiosity better suited to the Middle Ages: a "tragi-comic charade … by medieval means."3 Other scholars have pointed out that there existed a specific tradition of defenestration in Prague. From this perspective, the events of 1618 have been described as a "peculiarity of Prague's judicial culture."4 In a similar vein, and with similar vagueness, the defenestration of 1618 has been called a "ritual."5 But what exactly is the meaning of this ritual? There are, to my knowledge, only two small studies that have explicitly addressed this question. The first of these essays, by Milo Kearney, linked defenestration to the religious and magical connotations of the "literal fall," especially as reflected in medieval and early modern lore.6 The second, by James Palmitessa, convincingly situated the Prague defenestration in the context of Bohemian history, foregrounding its connections to rituals of "popular and local politics and protest."7This article takes cues from these two insightful studies, but it also seeks to provide a more extensive and detailed analysis of this ritual, using the events in Prague as a starting point for a broader investigation of the phenomenon of defenestration in early modern political culture. It will systematically discuss how defenestration, as a carefully staged ritual of punishment, drew on a wide range of theological, legal, and visual traditions—some of which have been overlooked by historians. At the same time, the phenomenon needs to be embedded in a larger European context. While the defenestration of 1618 might be the most well-known case, it was by no means the only one in premodern Europe; nor was defenestration the only form of punishment carried out at windows. Time and again in this period, windows became a location for trial and punishment. As the final part of this article will show, this tradition can be understood only in the context of another little-studied phenomenon: the increasing significance of windows as a setting for political activity, ceremonial events, and the public display of power. Windows might, at first, seem to be an unlikely topic of historical study; a closer look, however, reveals that their material history and symbolism is closely tied to the history of shifting representations of political power and concepts of sovereignty. Defenestration and other window-related forms of punishment that emerged in this period represent a dark chapter in this history.8 They raise broader questions about the interrelation of the history of architecture and material culture, on the one hand, and political symbolism and culture, on the other, in early modern Europe.The Defenestration of 1618: A Closer LookLet us begin with the events of 1618. In the first months of that year, the decades-old tensions between the majority Protestant population and the Catholic Habsburg rulers intensified dramatically.9 News of the decreed closure and demolition of Protestant churches spread like wildfire throughout the country, as these measures flagrantly contradicted the right to religious freedom that Emperor Rudolf II had conceded to the Protestants in the so-called Letter of Majesty of 1609. In the spring of 1618, this led to an official complaint from the Protestant estates to Emperor Matthias in Vienna. The emperor, however, brusquely dismissed the complaint and forbade the delegates of the Protestant estates to assemble for any political council in the future. Bohemians reacted indignantly to this news, suspecting that the forces desiring the re-Catholicization of the Kingdom of Bohemia had gained the upper hand among the Habsburgs. Fears of this nature had been festering for some time. Disregarding the ban on assembly, the representatives of the Protestant estates gathered in Prague to discuss their course of action. After two days of deliberations, on May 23, 1618, a group of roughly 200 estate representatives set out for Prague Castle, the center of Habsburg rule in Bohemia.The march to Prague Castle was not the result of long planning, but it was not completely spontaneous either. A few days earlier, imperial regents had officially instructed the representatives of the Protestant estates to gather at the Hradčany, where news from the emperor would be conveyed to them. Before they set out on May 23, the protesters had prepared a written statement in which they declared that they would "all stand together as one man and remain firmly resolute, one for all."10 In the castle, they were met by two Catholic imperial regents—Jaroslav Bořita Martinic and Vilém Slavata—who were widely considered the masterminds behind the recent attack on religious freedom. Assembled in the chamber of the Bohemian council, the Protestant representatives read out their protest message. The two regents then had the opportunity to defend themselves and, predictably, they rejected the grievances. But their spurious arguments, which were little more than delaying tactics, did not convince the Protestants, who immediately proceeded to an ad-hoc trial. The verdict was that Martinic and Slavata should be "brought to justice" (schon Recht verfahren).11 Years later, the two condemned men would record their memories of this moment, and from these accounts in particular we are well informed about how subsequent events unfolded.12 Martinic and Slavata expected to be taken into custody, but instead, they were led across the room to one of the council chamber's windows.13 Martinic, who had started to pray, was first in line. He later recalled that the protest leaders dragged him "in his black canvas cloak, with sword and dagger, but without his hat … and with uncovered head to the window and thrust him wretchedly out the window down a distance of 30 cubits onto the stony castle ditch."14 Next came Slavata, whose defenestration was even more of an ordeal because he put up a fight and clung to the window ledge in an attempt to save himself; as a result, "they first beat and bloodied the fingers of his right hand, with which he was steadying himself, and then flung him through the same window, without a hat, though with his black velvet coat and rapier."15 Lastly, the protesters proceeded to defenestrate the secretary, Philip Fabricius, about whose experience we have less information.16All three men survived the fall. Considering the drop of roughly 18 meters, this was astonishing, and historians will probably never find an entirely satisfying explanation.17 One theory holds that the defenestrated men landed relatively gently in a dung heap in the ditch, but this explanation should probably be relegated to the realm of legend, even though it is attested in contemporary sources. Suffice it to say that Martinic recorded landing in the "stony castle ditch" (steinerigen Schloßgraben), and we also know that Slavata suffered considerable injuries. The most convincing explanation is that the wall below the window, which can still be seen today, slopes slightly and could have allowed the men to slide along rather than suffer an unbroken fall.18 The cloaks that the victims were wearing on that day may also have helped to soften the impact.19The chances of survival would have been far slimmer had the protesters opted to rid themselves of the regents in a different way. There were many such options. Just one look at the best-known illustration of the events—a copper engraving by Matthäus Merian the Elder from the 1640s—reveals enraged protesters carrying swords and arms, yet moving directly toward the window (fig. 1). Historical accounts by eyewitnesses support Merian's portrayal: when the protesters in the council chamber realized that the defenestrations had not been lethal, some used their firearms to shoot through the window at the victims, but without success.20 Soon after, in a letter that was disseminated across his realm, the emperor condemned not only the defenestrations but also the shots fired at the men in the ditch, who "survived, against all hope and due to especial mercy and divine intervention."21Fig. 1. Matthäus Merian the Elder, The Defenestration of Prague. From Theatrum Europaeum, oder Außführliche und Warhafftige Beschreibung aller und jeder denckwürdiger Geschichten (Frankfurt: Hoffmann, 1643) (1st ed. 1635), 1:16. H 1245.90.20, Houghton Library, Harvard University.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointClearly, then, the protesters could simply have used their firearms or their swords to carry out the executions.22 Nonetheless, they deliberately opted for defenestration. In an interrogation three years later, some of the Protestant rebels testified that they had agreed upon this form of punishment prior to the event.23 Whether that was true or not, assassination plans had circulated for a while and their enactment was considered inevitable by some of the Protestant leaders. Rumors that evil plans were afoot had even reached the regents, who later regretted having dismissed them.24 As for the method, the protesters must have agreed on it once they were inside the council chamber at the very latest, for the defenestration was carried out in a rather "orderly" fashion.25 First, the two regents were sentenced in an on-site trial. Other Habsburg men who were present in the chamber but not considered masterminds of the anti-Protestant policies were spared the last stage of the trial and led out of the chamber shortly before the defenestrations took place.26 The execution of the sentence was neither rushed nor erratic; in fact, the protesters took the time to remove the victims' hats. This had no practical significance, but it certainly heightened the humiliating nature of the punishment.27 Before carrying out the sentence, the protesters are said to have announced that "an Apologia would be published afterward, so that the entire world might see that we have acted entirely lawfully and appropriately."28 This first Apologia—a second one followed the year after—did indeed appear two days after the event and was immediately sent on to the emperor.29 In this document, the protest leaders emphasized that the defenestrations were not meant as a threat to the emperor. Instead, the punishment—the protesters spoke euphemistically of an "act of defense" (Defension-Werck)—was carried out specifically against the "destroyers of justice and of the general peace" (zustörern des Rechtens und allgemeinen Friedens); in other words, it was aimed only against individuals who were thought to have acted without authorization and against the emperor's will. The protestors expressly stated that "no harm was inflicted on any other person, either clergy or layman, during these proceedings" and that the punishment was carried out without any upheaval (Auflauff).30 From the protestors' perspective, defenestration was inevitable: "It was neither appropriate nor possible to do anything else" (anderst und weniger zu thun nit gebühret noch möglichen gewesen).31 But why did the Prague protesters have no choice other than defenestration, at least in their view?One answer can be found in Bohemian history, which reveals the defenestration of 1618 to have been but one iteration in a long tradition.32 We do not know exactly when this ritualized form of punishment first emerged in Bohemia, but as early as the second half of the fourteenth century it was sufficiently familiar for preachers to mention it in public.33 The earliest dated case of defenestration in Bohemia that I have found so far occurred in 1414. In that instance, residents of the Bohemian town Kutná Hora (Kuttenberg) threw one of the king's messengers out the window after he demanded certain taxes. Little is known about how this defenestration was carried out, but the resulting local conflict did become the subject of a folk song.34 Five years later, in 1419, Prague would see a similar though far more serious incident, which became a prelude to the Hussite Wars.35 Led by the preacher Jan Želivský, the Utraquists—devotees of a generally moderate strain within the Hussite movement—celebrated Mass and then marched to the New City Hall to demand the release of their co-religionists imprisoned there. Supporters of the Catholic party, including several city councilmen, watched the gathering from the windows of the City Hall; some sources also report that the Catholics threw stones at the Utraquists. Soon enough the situation escalated: the Utraquists stormed the City Hall and threw the burgomaster, two councilmen, and seven other people out of the windows. These defenestrations did prove deadly: the victims were thrown into the crowd, and, where necessary, their demise was completed by blows from daggers and cudgels. The Utraquists, up to this point, had concealed their weapons under their cloaks, which is another indication that the violence was planned in advance. In the autumn of the same year, the Catholic camp took revenge not by defenestration but by a different kind of free fall: several hundred Utraquists met their deaths by being thrown down mine shafts in the town of Kutná Hora.36 A few decades later, in 1483, Prague saw more defenestrations when Hussites claimed to have discovered a conspiracy among the city councilmen. Amid the unrest that broke out in the city, several councilmen were killed and then thrown out of the windows.37 On other occasions in Bohemian history, defenestration was threatened but not carried out—for instance, during a coup in Prague in 1524.38 Similarly, during the religious conflicts at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Bohemian Protestants time and again threatened radical Catholics and members of the House of Habsburg with defenestration.39The perpetrators of 1618 drew on this long tradition as they carried out their own deed. In the Apologia sent to the emperor, they stated that the three men were "thrown out of the window according to the old custom."40 In the so-called Grosse Apologia, which appeared in print a year after the event, the protesters returned to this argument and emphasized that the emperor's three men had been "thrown out the window according to old custom and following examples of the same, of which there have been many in this Kingdom of Bohemia and in Prague."41 The same explanation appeared in Bohemian broadsheets from shortly after the events, which likewise justified the defenestrations as "old Bohemian custom" (in Czech: po staročesku).42 In the course of the Thirty Years' War some of the ringleaders of 1618 would continue to call for the defenestration of Catholics.43 Even members of the Protestant elite were threatened with this punishment when they did not cooperate.44Here arises what seems to be a paradox: defenestrations were considered an "old custom," but they were never codified in writing as an established form of punishment.45 I am not aware of any mention of defenestration in Bohemian legal documents. This also holds true beyond Bohemia. Early modern penal codes—for example, the well-known Carolina—are compendia of grisly punishments, among which we can find impalement, drowning, or breaking by the wheel.46 Being thrown out the window, however, is not mentioned in any of these texts. Indeed, the initiators of the Prague defenestrations of 1618 admitted that "the motivation for this deed comes from neither Bartolus nor Baldus, still less from hair-splitting rhetoric, but rather from heroic and noble impetus."47 Thus, codified law—epitomized here by Bartolus and Baldus, famous legal commentators of the fourteenth century—did not serve as justification for the defenestrations. Instead, this form of punishment was considered an "old custom." But where did it gain its legitimacy and meaning? And why was it considered "heroic"?The Religious MeaningTo find answers to these questions, we must take a closer look at the Bible. In Kings II we find the story of Jezebel, the powerful wife of the King of Northern Israel, who ridiculed Commander Jehu from a window.48 The enraged Jehu (who later became king) ordered some of the servants who were standing near her to hurl Jezebel out the window: "And he said, Throw her down. So they threw her down: and some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the horses: and he trode her under foot."49 According to the biblical chronicler, dogs then mauled Jezebel's body until there was nothing left apart from "the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands."50 It should be noted that in this biblical story, the setting for the scene is a palace, and it is made clear that the defenestration is not an arbitrary act but rather a targeted and, by Old Testament standards, legitimate punishment. The biblical story even proclaims Jezebel's grisly fate to be the fulfillment of a divine prophecy.51 As biblical scholar Nehama Aschkenasy puts it, "Jezebel is the epitome of evil in the Bible."52There are, of course, differences between Jezebel's fall from the window and the defenestrations of the early modern period, in particular that in the Bible it is a woman who meets this fate. But one significant detail links Jezebel's story with many of the later defenestrations: they were all intentional acts of violence inflicted upon oppressors of "true religion." Indeed, among Jezebel's various misdeeds, one was especially salient from a biblical perspective: her attempts to lure the Northern Kingdom away from true belief and toward idolatry.53 This aspect of the story resonated with early modern people, who lived amid constant rivalries between religious factions and revolts against religious oppression. In this environment, the story of Jezebel and her punishment received particular attention.54 For evidence, we can look to a series of early modern engravings and woodcuts showing Jezebel's defenestration.55 The story was also rendered in three-dimensional artwork, such as the so-called Jezebel chimneypiece, a large stone relief from Heath Old Hall in West Yorkshire, which depicts Jezebel's fall and probably dates to the late sixteenth century.56 For our discussion, the most noteworthy visual representation of Jezebel's fall is Matthäus Merian's engraving from 1625, created only a few years after the events of Prague (fig. 2). What is more, it was the same Matthäus Merian who produced the most famous illustration of the Prague defenestrations. Interestingly, Merian's take on the Jezebel story, like those by many other early modern artists, differs from medieval depictions of the same subject in that it emphasizes Jezebel's fall from the window rather than her mangled corpse on the ground.57Fig. 2. Matthäus Merian the Elder, The Defenestration of Jezebel. From Icones Biblicae praecipuas Sacrae Scripturae historias eleganter & graphice repraesentantes (Frankfurt: De Bry, 1625–27), 123. Typ 620.25.567, Houghton Library, Harvard University.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointClearly, many premodern people were familiar with the biblical story of Jezebel; indeed, many of them would have had a vivid mental image of her fall. This was certainly true in Bohemia, where rival religious factions, even before the Reformation, frequently accused one another of worshipping false idols. Tellingly, the fifteenth-century noblewoman Anna von Mochov, who favored the Hussites, was branded the "gruesome Jezebel."58 But this discourse was not limited to Bohemia. During the French Wars of Religions, the leading Catholic preachers of Paris were up in arms when the king and his powerful mother, Catherine de Medici, sealed a truce with the Huguenots in 1568. In their sermons, the preachers did not shy away from "comparing His Majesty and His mother, the queen, to King Ahab and Queen Jezebel from the Old Testament." Enumerating the many misdeeds of Ahab and Jezebel, the preachers suggestively pointed out that "eventually, it ended very badly for them."59 This biblical story was also invoked in the Low Countries, another area marked by a decades-long religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants: thus, in 1601, the Flemish Jesuit Jan David argued that the story of "Jezebel's fall" (Iezabelis lapsus) as well as her being devoured by dogs foreshadowed the fate of all heretics (i.e., Protestants): "Those who, out of pride, fall from the Church into a precipice, are consumed by the dogs of hell and by eternal death."60Protestants invoked the same sort of rhetoric against Catholics, as in a 1558 diatribe of the Scottish Protestant John Knox against the Catholic Mary I, the "Cursed Jesabel of England."61 And in the case of Prague in 1618, the invocation of the biblical story by Protestants implied a call to action, justifying the use of the same form of punishment that was imposed on Jezebel. This is confirmed by a close reading of the Bohemian sources. In the Grosse Apologia of 1619, the rebels explicitly stated that they wanted to make an example of the imperial regents, "just the same as in the divine and holy scriptures in the case of Queen Jezebel, who persecuted God's people."62 This was more than just a legitimizing argument ex post facto; rather, it very much aligned with an established interpretatory tradition in which the punishment of defenestration was embedded. Interestingly, even members of the Jewish community of Bohemia—although the community's leaders opposed the defenestration and the toppling of Habsburg rule—made the same connection: thus, the Prague rabbi Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller commemorated the defenestration of 1618 in a Hebrew poem in which he described the fall of the Catholic regents in poetic language directly taken from 2 Kings 9. In other words, Heller's positive view of the Habsburg regents—"the king's greatest"—did not prevent him from drawing, just as the Protestants did, an analogy with the defenestration of Jezebel.63The Jezebel story, associated as it was with an uprising against unjust rule and religious oppression, gave defenestration a specifically religious legitimacy as a form of punishment. Indeed, the Prague defenestration of 1618 was not the last one; nor did it fail to inspire religious zealots elsewhere in Europe. We know, for instance, that similar plans were hatched in other places marked by religious tension, such as the bi-confessional city of Augsburg. In 1619, a certain Hans Hassler raised suspicions there when he proclaimed—in direct reference to the previous year's events in Prague—that the Catholic government officials should be "thrown out the window."64 A few years later, in 1626, the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus addressed the Calvinists of Brandenburg, whose leaders had declared the raging Thirty Years' War "a religious war," and called on them to defenestrate their country's only Catholic councilor.65 In other places riven by religious conflict, such threats were not the end of the matter. In France, for instance, enraged Huguenots killed and then defenestrated the Catholic governor of Dauphiné in 1562.66 This murder, depicted in contemporary broadsheets, was not forgotten by French Catholics (whose preachers, as we have seen, made the Jezebel story a centerpiece of their sermons).67 This might be one of the reasons why, as part of a larger conspiracy, the Catholics decided to defenestrate the Huguenot leader and admiral Gaspard de Coligny—whom they viewed as a threat because of his growing influence on the king—in the notorious St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (1572). It remains unclear, however, whether the brutally stabbed Coligny was dead or still alive at the time of his fall.68Religiously motivated defenestrations were, of course, not limited to Catholic-Protestant conflict. A case in point is the so-called Amberger Lärmen (Amberg riots), an uprising of the Lutheran population against the Calvinist government in 1592. As visual representations of the events indicate, this conflict involved the defenestration of at least one government official.69 Under different auspices, but still in the context of religious conflict, we even find a case in Spain in the 1520s of a Jew—namely, the Jewish "ambassador" David Re'uveni—publicly defenestrating a Catholic priest who had denigrated Judaism.70Defenestration and Divine InterventionThe French examples remind us that defenestration may take two forms, as it can be inflicted on dead victims as well as on living ones. The former seems to have been more common in the medieval period. For example, among the Merovingians—who occasionally used defenestration as punishment for criminals and political foes—victims would be killed just before defenestration.71 We also know that members of the first crusade (1096), in their massacres of Jewish communities in the Rhineland, would typically kill their victims first and then throw them out a window.72 There certainly was a strong element of dishonoring involved in such cases. It fits into this picture that medieval Germanic laws allowed the throwing of a suicide's corpse out the window—a custom that was still remembered, and occasionally practiced, in the early modern period and that implied dishonoring the suicide, who, according to the Church's teaching, had committed a grave sin.73Most of the defenestrations mentioned above, however, involved living victims. The element of humiliation was certainly present in these cases; but there were additional layers of meaning, and this brings us back to the rich religious connotations of this form of punishment. Indeed, the story of Jezebel was not the only defenestration mentioned in the Bible. Beginning in the Middle Ages, readers and exegetes of the Holy Scriptures frequently interpreted a verse from the book of Joel (2:8), which actually concerns a plague of locusts, to signify defenestration.74 The Hebrew original reads as follows: "Ve-ish achiv lo yidchakun, gever bi-mesilato yelechun, u-ve'ad ha-shelach yipolu, lo yivza'u." The meaning of this verse remains obscure to this day. Modern editions of the Bible tend to translate the Hebrew word ha-shelach as either "weapons," "sword," or "loophole."75 The new translation from the Jewish Publication Society (2003) reads: "No one jostles another, each keeps to his own course, and should they fall through a loophole, they do not get hurt." By contrast, the eleventh-century commentator Rashi, the most respected of all medieval Jewish exegetes, interpreted ha-shelach as "weapon" in his reading of this passage—"As through the windows, they fall upon the weapons and camp"—yet, as this same line indicates, the various references to windows in the same chapter led him to speak of an analogy with defenestration.76 On the Christian side, Saint Jerome (ca. 347–420) went even further. In his translation he understood ha-shelach specifically to mean "window," and the corresponding verse in the Vulgate thus speaks of a fall "through windows."Some later theologians, among them Nicholas of Lyra in the fourteenth century, found Jerome's translation dubious. Other commentators, however, trusted the Church father's authority and tried to make sense of this puzzling reference to a window. For example, in his commentary on the book of Joel, the medieval scholar now known as Pseudo-Hugh of Saint Victor contemplated those beings that fall through windows without coming to any harm. He concluded that this passage should be understood allegorically and that windows could be interpreted as "modes of divine contemplation." From this he inferred that "the apostles and apostolic men fall safely through these windows because they prostrate themselves humbly before the Creator in their devout meditation. Thus they are not destroyed in falling but rather elevated and fortified."77We do not know how many people read Pseudo-Hugh's speculations, but in any case his interpretation highlights a particular view of defenestration that was popular in Christianity as early as the Middle Ages, namely, the idea that God or his saints and angels can save people or sacred objects that have wrongly been plunged into a fall—as, for example, out of a window.78 Such ideas consistently tied in with folk religion and superstition. One well-known portrayal of this sort of miracle can be found in Simone Martini's Altarpiece of Blessed Agostino Novello (ca. 1328), which shows the miraculous salvation of a child who, due to family neglect, fell from the top floor of a house (fig. 3). Similar depictions appear frequently on paintings and votive tablets well into the early nineteenth century.79 The belief in miracles and divine intervention in cases of falls can be linked with various biblical passages. The New Te
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