First Defenestration of Prague

July 30, 1419

Hussite radicals stormed the New Town hall, seized seven Catholic councillors, and threw them from the upper windows onto the pikes of the crowd below. The signal was unmistakable: Bohemia would not submit. Sigismund's crusade against the heretics would fail for fifteen years, stopped by wagon-forts and peasant hymns. Defenestration became a Bohemian tradition of regime change, repeated in 1618 to ignite the Thirty Years' War.