The story of this place
The Old Royal Palace at Prague Castle grew from a Romanesque hall into the vast late-Gothic Vladislav Hall of 1500, so wide its ribbed vaults arch unsupported and knights once jousted on horseback indoors. But its most fateful moment came on 23 May 1618, when Protestant nobles, enraged by Habsburg suppression of their religious liberties, marched into a chamber of the palace and hurled two Catholic imperial governors and their secretary out of a high window into the moat below. All three survived — Catholics said angels caught them, Protestants said a dung heap — but the Second Defenestration of Prague ignited the Bohemian Revolt and, with it, the catastrophic Thirty Years' War.