Kock has been recognized as an established community since the 12th century. It received its city charter in 1417, by King Władysław II Jagiełło, who granted the charter upon request of Jakub, the Bishop of Płock. From 1512 Kock was shortly a royal town of Poland, and afterwards it was a private town, administratively located in the Lublin Voivodeship in the Lesser Poland Province of the Polish Crown. In 1518 the town belonged to Mikolaj Firlej, Crown Hetman and the Voivode of Sandomierz. The Firlej family owned Kock until the second half of the 18th century, and at that time the town became an important center of the Protestant Reformation in Lesser Poland. Around the year 1750 Kock passed into the hands of Princess Anna Jabłonowska of the Sapieha family, who invested a lot of money and energy into the town, ordering the construction of a town hall, a palace and a church. Furthermore, she established the market square (or rynek). Polish King Stanisław August Poniatowski visited Kock several times. Kock was annexed by Austria in the Third Partition of Poland in 1795. It was regained by Poles in 1809 and included in the short-lived Polish Duchy of Warsaw, and in 1815 it became part of so-called Congress Poland in the Russian Partition of Poland. The residents of the town participated in the January Uprising, for which the Russians deprived Kock of its town rights (1870, recovered in 1915). Several important battles took place at Kock in the 19th and early 20th centuries: