Tarczyn’s history reaches back to the 13th century, when a local trading–post and market was established close to the banks of a small river, known today as Tarczynka, thereby deriving its name from this river. Early documented references to the locality include: “Tarczin” (1284), Tarczyno (1303), Tarczyn (1353,1580), Tharczino (1355, 1241), Tarcynum (1634). Tarczyn was first mentioned in 1259. In 1353 the Mazovian Duke Casimir I gave the locality its Magdeburgian Town Charter and financed the founding of Gothic St. Nicolas’s church. Tarczyn was administratively located in the Masovian Voivodeship in the Greater Poland Province of the Polish Crown until the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, when it was annexed by Prussia. In 1807 it was regained by Poles and included within the short-lived Polish Duchy of Warsaw, and after its dissolution, in 1815, it passed to newly formed Congress Poland within the Russian Partition of Poland. It was deprived of its town rights by the Tsarist administration following the unsuccessful Polish January Uprising of 1863–1864. Poland eventually regained independence after World War I in 1918, and Tarczyn was restored to Poland.