Imagine the sheer terror of standing in the grand meeting room of a castle when an angry mob corners you, drags you to an open window, and shoves you out. You are now plunging 70 feet straight down toward a rocky moat. While this sounds like an over-the-top action movie scene, it was actually a highly methodical political strategy in Bohemia. The English language has a hyper-specific word just for this act—defenestration—derived from the Latin fenestra (window). Far from a punchline, this brutal tradition repeatedly served as a very loud, public statement of mob justice, launching catastrophic holy wars and permanently reshaping the map of Europe.

The reason the word entered modern vocabulary is entirely due to a series of events in Prague, stretching from the late medieval era to the dawn of the Cold War. In 1419, the First Defene ...