On the morning of May 23rd, 1618, a group of Protestant noblemen marched into the royal council chamber of Prague Castle and threw three men out of a window. The drop was seventy feet. All three survived. Catholics said it was angels. Protestants said it was a dung heap. Both sides immediately printed pamphlets. And within months, the Thirty Years War had begun — a conflict that would kill up to eleven million people and permanently reshape the relationship between religion and political power in the Western world.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the centuries of religious tension between Catholic and Protestant powers in central Europe, the fragile Bohemian nobility and their collision with Habsburg authority, and the three men who fell from that window and set an entire continent on fire. This episode follows the chain ...