Notable Defenestrations In History

The Wikipedia page for Defenestration has a list of Notable Defenestrations throughout history.

Unfortunately most of them were not committed by The Defenestrator.

Some highlights:

• “As recorded in the book of Kings II in the Bible, Jezebel was defenestrated at Jezreel by her own servants at the urging of Jehu. (2 Kings 9: 33)”
• “The crowd stormed the city hall and threw the patricians out of the window. At least 15 patricians were killed during this defenestration of Leuven.”
• “In 1572, French King Charles IX’s friend, the Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny, was killed in accordance with the wishes of Charles’ mother,Catherine de’ Medici.”
• “On the morning of December 1, 1640 in Lisbon, a group of supporters of the Duke of Braganza party found Miguel de Vasconcelos, the hated Portuguese Secretary of State of the Habsburg Philip III, hidden in a closet, killed him and defenestrated him. His corpse was left to the public outrage.”
• “During the Polish January 1863 Uprising, Russian troops threw Frédéric Chopin’s piano out of a second-story apartment. The incident was famously memorialized in Polish poet Cyprian Norwid’s poem, “Chopin’s Piano.””
• “In 1993, Toronto lawyer Garry Hoy fell to his death after attempting to demonstrate the strength of his office tower’s windows.”

Also unfortunately, the list of defenestrations become steadily less humorous as the list nears the present day.  (Except for Mr. Garry Hoy, who has been honored with a Darwin Award.)  I guess the lesson here is that it doesn’t matter how awesome you were in life, or how tragic your death was.  If you get chucked out a window, give it a couple hundred years.  Eventually people will be amused by it.

More on the Wikipedia page “Defenestration.”