have you ever seen the documentary “Men At Work”?
The Defenesration of Prague features some shit
French farmers do it all the time. Might be the reason why they’ve managed to convince the EU to give them so much money.
TLDR at bottom
Not a Historian: The one thing I can think of the Third Defenestration of Prague. The use of shit is mostly coincidental but the event led to one of the bloodiest wars in Europe: The Thirty Years’ war.
Defenestration means the act of throwing someone out of a window. The first two Defenestration a of Prague took place in the 1700s and while the first one started a war, the second one ushered in decades of religious peace in Bohemia. The third one precipitated the Thirty Years’ war.
Bohemia was at the time under the control of the Habsburg kings of Austria, specifically Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Him and his brother Mathias who succeeded him were tolerant of the protestant movement and did not impose their Catholic views on their subjects.
The conflict arose when the childless Mathias made his cousin, Ferdinand II, heir to the throne in 1617. Ferdinand was a staunch supporter of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and did seek to impose the catholic religion on his subjects.
The Defenestration took place when Catholic officials, claiming to represent the king, came to Prague on May 23, 1618, to meet with owners of large protestant estates as well as their inhabitants. At the castle in Prague, the officials, all hardline Catholics, produced a letter that sanctioned the confiscation of protestant lands and the execution of the owners of the estates.
The protestant land owners did not take kindly to this and decided to protect themselves from such persecutions. They believed that some of the catholic officials present were responsible for the contents of the king’s letter. Eventually two of the four were deemed responsible and confessed to having had a hand in preparing the letter. They were promptly defenestrated, i.e thrown out of a window, from the third floor of the castle. They survived the 70 ft fall only because they fell into a large pile of horse shit.
Following Mathias death in 1619, Ferdinand II was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. At the same time, Bohemia broke away and declared Frederick V, king of Bohemia. What followed was 30 years of bloody religious fighting across the continent that eventually saw places like Germany loose something like 60% of their population, ending only with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
TLDR; a bunch of Protestant landowners threw a couple of Catholic officials out a castle window and into a pile of Horse shit, thus starting one of the bloodiest wars in Europe’s history.
One that I can think of happened recently, in 2017.
