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Comment by tifik | Hacker News Reader

These are well known in general Czech population (I mean the fact they occured, not necessarily all the details), and it is not uncommmon to use the verb "to defenestrate" as a joke when talking about mounting some form of protest.

Source: Born and raised in Bohemia.

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They are also part of history classes in Germany. Especially the 1618 Defenestration, which started the Thirty Years War (arguably the most influential war in European history, even though that's a title with lots of contenders).

Influential? That war surely feels like a motivation for secular ideas in Germany, but the actual outcome in Augsburg was that rulers were free to pick the confession for their realm, hardly more than a confirmation of what had been happening before. A less bloody path to that lowest form of peaceful coexistence between Lutherans and Catholics could not have been very different. Secular ideas did not really become a reality before Napoleon shook things up. Other than that, what did the war change, outside of a population reset? I'd rather rate it surprisingly free of consequence considering the amount of destruction.

The modern idea of a state, with involatile borders and exclusive sovereignty on its land, people and agents abroad, is popularly traced back to the Peace of Westphalia [1]. At least as much as such an idea can be traced to any singular event.

It also caused the end of theocracy in Europe. And of course the massive population declines (over 50% in some regions) lead to all sorts of social changes. Without all of this, the Age of Enlightenment, which was just starting in the final years of the Thirty Year's War, might have played out differently across Europe.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_system

Theocracy ended with the acceptance that most people will end up eternally damned as there can't be two competing religions holding the complete truth and European population was quickly fractured into "us vs heretics" depending on the side one was on, whereas before everybody was part of the same church. That weakened religion and allowed rationalist thought to emerge.

Correct, sir, you win full marks for the Westphalian system!

One can argue about how things would have happened anyway, or were happening already, but the Treaty was where it all got formalized and agreed to.

Thanks, no idea how I confused the peace resolutions of Augsburg and Westphalia. Massive misconception considering that Augsburg was the century before, setting up the status quo that led to the war. And I did not even go blindly by memory, but apparently I found a path of selectively reading up that made it possible to somehow miss what should have been obvious.

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