page_title: Łódź
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Łódź / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Coat of Arms of Łódź from 1577 Sigillum opidi Lodzia 1577
context_page_description: Łódź, written in English as Lodz, is the third-largest city in Poland and a former industrial centre. Located in the central part of the country, it has a population of 679,941. It is the capital of Łódź Voivodeship, and is located approximately 120 kilometres south-west of Warsaw. The city's coat of arms is an example of canting, as it depicts a boat, which alludes to the city's name.
  Łódź was once a small settlement that first appeared in 14th-century records. Despite being granted town rights in 1423, it remained the private property of the Kuyavian bishops and clergy until the late 18th century. The Second Industrial Revolution brought rapid growth in textile manufacturing and in population due to the inflow of migrants, notably Germans and Jews. Ever since the industrialization of the area, the city has struggled with multinationalism and social inequalities, which were documented in the novel The Promised Land by Nobel Prize-winning author Władysław Reymont. The contrasts greatly reflected on the architecture of the city, where luxurious mansions coexisted with redbrick factories and dilapidated tenement houses.
context_section_description: Łódź first appears in the written record in a 1332 document giving the village of Łodzia to the bishops of Włocławek. In 1423 King Władysław II Jagiełło officially granted city rights to the village of Łódź. From then until the 18th century the town remained a small settlement on a trade route between the provinces of Masovia and Silesia. In the 16th century the town had fewer than 800 inhabitants, mostly working on the surrounding grain farms.
  With the second partition of Poland in 1793, Łódź became part of the Kingdom of Prussia's province of South Prussia, and was known in German as Lodsch. In 1798 the Prussians nationalised the town, and it lost its status as a town of the bishops of Kuyavia. In 1806 Łódź joined the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw and in 1810 it had approximately 190 inhabitants. After the 1815 Congress of Vienna treaty it became part of the Congress Kingdom of Poland, a client state of the Russian Empire.
caption: Sigillum oppidi Lodzia - seal dating back to 1577
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