It is the largest institution of higher learning in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship, with over 100,000 graduates since 1945, including some 1,900 researchers, among whom many have received the highest awards for their contributions to the development of scientific scholarship.

The oldest mention of a university in Wrocław comes from the foundation deed signed on 20 July 1505 for the Generale litterarum Gymnasium in Wrocław by King Vladislaus II of Hungary (Polish: Władysław II Jagiellończyk) of the Polish Jagiellonian dynasty.

However, the new academic institution requested by the town council was not built, because the King's deed was rejected by Pope Julius II for political reasons.

The first successful founding deed known as the Aurea bulla fundationis Universitatis Wratislaviensis was signed two centuries later, on 1 October 1702, by the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I of the House of Austria, King of Hungary and Bohemia.

[5] The predecessor facilities, which existed since 1638, were converted into Jesuit school, and finally, upon instigation of the Jesuits and with the support of the Silesian Oberamtsrat (Second Secretary) Johannes Adrian von Plencken, donated as a university in 1702 by Emperor Leopold I as a School of Philosophy and Catholic Theology with the designated name Leopoldina.

These volumes came from the libraries of the former universities of Frankfurt and Breslau and from disestablished monasteries, and also included the oriental collections of the Bibliotheca Habichtiana and the academic Leseinstitut.

In addition, the university owned an observatory; a five-hectare botanical garden; a botanical museum and a zoological garden founded in 1862 by a joint-stock company; a natural history museum; zoological, chemical, and physical collections; the chemical laboratory; the physiological plant; a mineralogical institute; an anatomical institute; clinical laboratories; a gallery (mostly from churches, monasteries, etc.)

The Polish fraternities were all eventually disbanded by the German professor Felix Dahn,[7] and in 1913 Prussian authorities established a numerus clausus law that limited the number of Jews from non-German Eastern Europe (so called Ostjuden) that could study in Germany to at most 900.

[15] Parts of the collection of the university library perished during the Soviet offensive in 1945,[16] burned by soldiers on 10 May 1945, four days after the German garrison surrendered the city[citation needed].

[15] Following postwar border shifts, thousands of former employees of the Lwów Library, the Jan Kazimierz University and Ossoliński National Institute moved to the city.

[22] In mid-1948, over 60% of professors at the Wrocław University and Polytechnic were from Kresy, with academics from prewar Lwów playing a particularly important role in the newly established Polish institutions of higher learning.