The Milicz Ponds, an important habitat and breeding ground for water birds, are a nature reserve established 1963 and protected under the Ramsar convention.

It is listed as a possession of the Polish Archdiocese of Gniezno in an 1154 deed issued by Pope Adrian IV, it is later also mentioned under the Latin name Milicium in a 1249 document by Duke Przemysł I of Greater Poland.

The Polish name Mylicz first appeared in the Liber fundationis episcopatus Vratislaviensis (Book of endowments of the Bishopric of Wrocław) manuscript written about 1305 at the behest of Bishop Henry of Wierzbnej.

In 1358 the Wrocław bishops finally sold their Milicz estates to the Piast duke Konrad I, whose successors had a Gothic castle built.

After the Red Army's Vistula–Oder Offensive and Nazi Germany's defeat in World War II, Milicz became again part of Poland, although with a Soviet-installed communist regime, which stayed in power until the 1980s.

Milicz is the site of one of the six Churches of Grace, which the Silesian Protestants were allowed to build with the permission of Habsburg emperor Joseph I, also King of Bohemia, given at the Altranstädt Convention of 1707.