Template:Wp-Lidzbark Warmiński-History

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The town was originally an settlement of Old Prussians known as Lecbarg until being conquered in 1240 by the Teutonic Knights, who named it Heilsberg. In 1306 it became the seat for the Bishopric of Warmia, and remained the Prince-Bishop's seat for 500 years.^[1] In 1309 the settlement received town privileges. In the 1350s the Castle of Warmian Bishops was built, and it was expanded in the following centuries, becoming one of the most significant and remarkable historic monuments of Warmia, which nowadays houses a museum and is listed as a Historic Monument of Poland. In 1440 the town joined the anti-Teutonic Prussian Confederation, upon the request of which in 1454 Polish King Casimir IV Jagiellon incorporated the region and town to the Kingdom of Poland. This caused the Polish–Teutonic Thirteen Years' War, as a result of which in the Second Peace of Thorn (1466) the Teutonic Order ended its claim to the area and recognized it as part of Poland. It was the capital of the Prince-Bishopric of Warmia in the Polish province of Royal Prussia in the larger Greater Poland Province of the Polish Crown.

Nicolaus Copernicus first visited the town at the turn of 1495 and 1496, and then lived at the castle from 1503.^[2] It is believed he wrote part of his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium there.

In the winter of 1703–04 the town was the residence of King Charles XII of Sweden during the Great Northern War. In the mid-18th century a manuscript of the Gesta principum Polonorum, the oldest medieval Polish chronicle was discovered in the castle by Prince-Bishop Adam Stanisław Grabowski, by whose decision it was then published in print for the first time.

The town was annexed with the rest of the region by the Kingdom of Prussia in the First Partition of Poland in 1772. The town ceased to be the capital of the Prince-Bishopric of Warmia, which was disestablished, however it remained the seat of the last Prince-Bishop Ignacy Krasicki until 1795, and afterwards the town lost its cultural significance, which it has not regained since. In 1807 a battle took place near the town between the French under Joachim Murat and Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult and the Russians and Prussians under Levin August, count von Bennigsen.^[1]

From 1933 to 1945 it was the site of the large German government radio station Transmitter Heilsberg. The town was heavily damaged after its conquest by the Soviet Red Army during World War II in 1945. As part of territorial changes demanded by the Soviet Union at the Potsdam Conference, the town became once again part of Poland, and was gradually resettled by Poles, many of them from the parts of eastern Poland annexed by the Soviet Union.