The province had been established in 1269 on lands which until then had been part of the Bohemian Margraviate of Moravia, when King Ottokar II of Bohemia vested his natural son Nicholas I with Opava.

In the following struggle for the Bohemian throne, he backed the claims of the Luxembourg candidate John the Blind, who in turn enfeoffed his son and successor Nicholas II with the Duchy of Opava in 1318.

When in 1377 the brothers finally divided their Opava heritage, the eldest, John I, received the newly established Duchy of Krnov together with the Bruntál estates.

The House of Hohenzollern never withdrew the claims and more than one hundred years later, the Krnov and Racibórz possessions were a pretext for the Prussian king Frederick the Great to start the First Silesian War, ending with the annexation of most of Silesia according to the Treaty of Breslau in 1742.

Re-organised as the Krnov District (Krnovský kraj) from 1751, it was finally dissolved after the 1848 Revolution, when Austrian Silesia was raised to the status of a Cisleithanian crown land.