Lipno

Lipno grew in Dobrzyń Land, east of the Vistula, within the medieval Polish realm. It received town rights in 1349, giving the settlement an urban legal position in a country of villages and cultivated land. Its later importance extended beyond its own inhabitants: although Dobrzyń gave the region its name, Lipno became its principal centre and the meeting place of the local sejmik. The gatherings of the nobility made the town a place where regional political business joined ordinary urban life.

Under the Polish crown, Lipno belonged to the Inowrocław voivodeship and the Greater Poland province. Its political setting changed abruptly during the partitions. Prussia annexed the town in the Second Partition of 1793, ending its place within the Commonwealth. In 1807 it passed into the Duchy of Warsaw created during the Napoleonic wars. The settlement of 1815 placed it in Congress Poland under the Russian emperor. Within little more than twenty years, therefore, Lipno experienced three successive changes of state. Its early nineteenth-century history belongs to this unsettled transition from a regional town of the Polish crown to a town under Russian rule.