Łomża is one of the principal economic, educational, and cultural centres of north-eastern Masovia as well as one of the three main cities of Podlaskie Voivodeship (beside Białystok and Suwałki).

In the 16th century King Sigismund II Augustus gave Łomża the right to hold great fairs three times a year, similar to Warsaw and Płock.

In 1618 a great fire destroyed most of the city, and six years later, an epidemic killed 5,021 persons decimating its population.

A series of disasters (including the Swedish invasion and the Cossack raids) resulted in its rapid decline.

In July 1863, the Russians carried out a massacre of 50 unarmed young Poles in the nearby forest in Wygoda, mainly students of local schools, who joined the uprising.

[7][8] The victims were tortured and murdered in gruesome ways: some had their eyes gouged out, bones broken, or insides torn out before they died.

[7][8] From November 1863, the Russians carried out mass arrests and confiscations of Polish property, and many insurgents escaped from the country.

[11] During World War I, the Russian administration was evacuated in June 1915, and the city was occupied by Germany from August 1915[12] until 1918.

In November 1918, Poland regained independence, and the occupying German forces opened fire on Poles who tried to liberate the city,[13] but it was still reintegrated with the reborn Polish state.

[14] Łomża was directly in the path of the Russian army's catastrophic retreat following its defeat at the Battle of Warsaw.

In June 1941, at the onset of the Russian campaign Łomża was captured by the Wehrmacht and used as a communications hub by the German forces.

Since 1943, the Sicherheitspolizei carried out deportations of Poles including teenage boys from the local prison to the Stutthof concentration camp.

New housing estates came into existence along with several industrial plants, among them Łomża cotton and furniture factories and starch manufacturer PEPEES, as well as municipal thermal power station.

World War I was especially hard on the Jewish community of Łomża, which was a major battle area against German military forces.

[40] On October 29, 1941, German troops forced over 1,000 Jewish residents of Łomża to kneel in trenches, and they murdered them all with machine guns.

The Nazi Einsatzkommando under SS-Obersturmführer Hermann Schaper committed mass killings of alleged Soviet collaborators a few days later.

[2][3][43][44] Only a small number of the Jews of Łomża survived the Holocaust; some found refuge with Catholic Polish families.

Following the Yalta Conference, the Soviets ceded the city to Poland, with its total population reduced to 12,500 inhabitants, none of whom were Jewish.

[45] The Torah was bought by Gerald C. Bender, a man living in Illinois in the United States whose father had been born and raised in Łomża.

Łomża has educated a number of dignitaries, among others: Szymon Konarski, Rafał Krajewski, Jakub Ignacy Weight, Wojciech Szweykowski, and Adam Chętnik.

The economy of Łomża is closely connected to its natural environment, with agricultural and forestry industries at the forefront of the region's economic development.

The economy is ecologically friendly, including the food industries, brewing, electronics, the manufacture of building materials and furniture, the production and processing of agricultural crops, as well as tourism and agro-tourism.

Even the largest companies employ less than 1,000 workers, even though a number of firms are listed on the Podlaskie Top One Hundred Entrepreneurs.

By the end of 2007, the number of people steadily employed in Łomża was 13,408, including 7,170 women,[49] however, the unemployment rate (as of 2009[update]) remained considerably high at 14.1 percent.