Protestants Throw Imperial Officials from a Prague Window

On the morning of 23 May 1618, an armed assembly of Bohemian Protestant nobles gathered at Hradcany Castle in Prague to confront the royal councilors of the Catholic Habsburg administration. Tension had mounted over religious freedoms granted in 1609 by Emperor Rudolf II in his Letter of Majesty, which guaranteed tolerance to the Protestant estates. When Emperor Matthias and his heir, the staunch Counter-Reformation supporter Ferdinand of Styria, ordered an end to the construction of Protestant chapels on royal territory and dissolved the protesting estates assembly, the Protestant leadership accused the imperial governors of treason.

Led by Count Thurn, the delegates entered the Bohemian Chancellery to demand whether the present councilors had recommended the imperial decrees against their chapels. Two of the regents, Adam von Sternberg and Popel Lobkowitz, were declared innocent of drafting the hostile royal letters and were escorted safely from the hall. The remaining two officials, Count Jaroslav Borita of Martinice and Count Vilem Slavata of Chlum, were ardent Catholic loyalists who acknowledged their participation in the imperial decisions, expecting merely to face formal detention.