Wieleń

Wieleń stands on the Noteć in Greater Poland. In 1239 Duke Władysław Odonic brought Cistercians to the settlement. It later became a privately owned town of the Polish nobility, held by families including the Czarnkowskis and Sapiehas. Zofia Czarnkowska founded the early Baroque Church of the Assumption and a hospital, while Piotr Paweł Sapieha built a Baroque palace.

Prussia annexed Wieleń in the first partition of Poland in 1772, using the German name Filehne. Following the Greater Poland uprising of 1806, the town became part of the Duchy of Warsaw. It returned to Prussia after the duchy's dissolution in 1815, a sequence of changes in government within a few decades.