The village was the site of the decisive Battle of Legnica during the first Mongol invasion of Poland on 9 April 1241.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the Prussian general Prince Blücher defeated a French army under Marshal MacDonald at the Kaczawa river (then Katzbach), a small river running through Legnickie Pole (then Wahlstatt) and Legnica (then Liegnitz), in the Battle of Katzbach on 26 August 1813.

As the Treaty of Versailles limited the size of the German military, the abbey was turned into a boarding school for boys in 1920.

[2] In March 1943, the Germans established the Oflag 64 POW camp for Yugoslav officers and Soviet enlisted men, which was relocated to Szubin in May 1943.

[3] The village became again part of Poland following the Nazi Germany's defeat in the war, although with a Soviet-installed communist regime, which stayed in power until the 1980s.