Insurrection 139fiction are difficult to distinguish. This applies particularly to accounts
which appeared in the press of the time, but also to letters and reports,
even official ones, which were almost entirely based on second-hand
or hearsay information from sources which were themselves dubious.
Similar reservations apply to the account given by Skála, a Protestant
academic who fled Prague after the defeat of the revolt, and who later
settled in Freiburg and wrote the first history of Bohemia to cover the
period from 1602 to 1623.^8 His version of the events in Prague in May
1618 has to be treated with great care, even though he may have had a
certain amount of near-direct knowledge, as historians from that period
were notoriously cavalier about sources, as well as prone to inventing
speeches which seemed to them to be appropriate. The Czech historian
and archivist Anton Gindely drew heavily upon this work, which was
eventually published in the 1860s, but whatever its wider merits it is
not an authentic first-hand account of the defenestration.
The only such records actually available are those provided by the
two main victims themselves. Slavata, however, wrote his account many
years later in his memoirs, while his report of the defenestration itself
is brief and may well be derivative, noting that he suffered a severe
head injury in his fall. Thus the main details he gives correspond closely
to Martinitz’s account, and he devotes much more space to the latter’s
subsequent escape to Bavaria, although he could have had no personal
knowledge of that as he was confined to bed in Prague recovering from
his injuries at the time.^9 The most comprehensive description of the
whole event is that attributed to Martinitz, a version of which was also
reportedly published soon after the event.^10
The following summary is drawn from Martinitz except where oth-
erwise noted, but some further caveats are necessary. Martinitz’s text
suffers from many of the usual problems of eyewitness accounts, in that
eyewitnesses do not see and hear everything, and they often remember
and record imperfectly what they do see and hear. He and his colleagues
were in one corner of the room, hemmed in by a large number of
men who were often shouting, sometimes from the back and not infre-
quently at the same time, while the principal speakers were addressing
the regents. It must have been difficult for them to hear exactly what
was said, and to note who said it, and it would have been virtually
impossible for them to hear much of what was said between themselves
by the leading figures or other members of the crowd. Martinitz may
well be broadly correct about the main sequence of events leading up
to the defenestration, but he was not able to capture and record the
internal dynamics driving the mood of the mob facing him, so that
his account describeswhathappened, rather thanhoworwhyit came