Kingdom of Kongo

A province that conquered its own kingdom

formationDrafted from Thornton, Journal of African History, vol. 66 (2025)

For most of a century, the standard account of how Kongo began described a single conquering hero: a chief from a small kingdom called Vungu, north of the Congo River, who crossed south with his followers, defeated the peoples he found there, and carved up the conquered land among his own men. It is a clean story, recorded in the 1620s and repeated by every historian who used it afterward, and it puts a spectacular founding at the start of Kongo's history in place of something slower and less flattering to tell.

A humble start in someone else's province

Working back through oral traditions gathered from outside the royal capital, in provinces whose own ruling families kept memories the court version had reason to drop, a different picture emerges. The kingdom's own founders did not arrive as outside conquerors. They began as the rulers of Mpemba Kasi, a small district inside the territory of a larger, older state

• a kingdom called Mpemba, which by some accounts had already stood for generations before Kongo's own name meant anything at all.

From that modest starting point, the rise was built one alliance at a time rather than in a single campaign. An arrangement with the ruling family of Mbata, in the Inkisi valley, secured a partner whose own leaders kept their throne and, in exchange, gained a permanent voice in choosing every king of Kongo who came after. A separate arrangement, this one military, brought in the province of Mpangu. A further concession gave a stake in royal succession to Vunda, itself formerly a province of Mpemba. Only once these pieces were in place did Mpemba itself - the state Kongo's own rulers had started out serving - fall to the alliance its former subjects had built.

A process, not an invasion

No source dates the fall of Mpemba itself. What can be dated, loosely, is the alliance-building that surrounded it: a process reckoned to the middle of the fourteenth century, and one that most likely took more than a single generation to complete. By the time Kongo's own court began writing its history down, in correspondence with Portugal in the early sixteenth century, the state built this way already looked old, settled and centralized enough that nobody thought to record it as anything other than finished business.

The country's own name survived the process by an accident of politics rather than scale: an alliance of provinces earlier and larger than the one that swallowed them chose to be remembered by the name of the smallest partner in it.

A founding story that kept changing

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Thornton, Journal of African History, vol. 66 (2025)

Four separate accounts of how Kongo began survive from the seventeenth century, and no two of them agree - not on where the founders came from, not on how they took power, and not even on which direction they arrived from. Read side by side, the disagreement turns out to say less about a distant past nobody recorded reliably than about the political moment each storyteller was actually addressing.

A blacksmith, or a killer

The earliest full account, recorded by the Jesuit Mateus Cardoso at Pedro II's coronation in 1622, describes a hero-conqueror from the north who crossed the Congo River and rapidly seized the land that became Kongo, handing out provinces to his own followers as he went. A different Italian missionary, Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, recorded a version around 1687 in which the same founding figure murders his own aunt in a dispute over a river crossing - proof, in a version composed for a court that still claimed near-absolute royal power, of a king's authority to enforce the law by force if he judged it necessary.

By 1710 a third missionary, Francesco da Pavia, was recording a version of the same founder as a wise and skillful blacksmith who settled disputes rather than started them. Forty years of civil war lay between Cavazzi's account and da Pavia's, and the shift in what the founding king was for - punishing rivals, or reconciling them - tracks the shift in what Kongo's own politics needed a founding story to justify.

A mother of Kongo, in a province the official story skipped

Cavazzi's own account also preserves a second story, gathered by a fellow missionary, Girolamo da Montesarchio, from people in the district of Mpemba Kasi who had no reason to repeat the capital's version of events. A woman there, describing herself as the "Mother of Kongo," told da Montesarchio that the kingdom's rule had begun in her own district - not with an invasion from outside at all, but earlier, before any of the conquest the official story remembered. A cemetery da Montesarchio was shown nearby, said to hold the earliest kings, matched nothing in Cardoso's account, because Cardoso's account was the one written for the capital, and the capital by 1622 had every reason to prefer a single decisive founder to a province it had since absorbed and demoted.

A third direction entirely

A fourth version, recorded in 1680 by an Angolan settler named António de Oliveira Cadornega, does not even agree that Kongo was founded from the north. Cadornega's informant, a Portuguese trader who had lived in Kongo's eastern territories, traced the kingdom's origin instead to the east, to a polity called Kongo dia Nlaza that had only been absorbed into Kongo itself in the 1580s - a claim that made sense to somebody whose own knowledge of Kongo's history came from its newest province rather than its oldest one.

None of the four accounts is a simple corruption of an original text passed down and garbled. Each is a full, internally consistent story, shaped by where its teller stood and what political question that teller's own moment needed the past to answer. The country's real origin, pieced together from provincial detail none of the four storytellers had reason to invent, looks less like any single one of them - and more like a decades- long alliance that each generation of retelling had its own reasons to compress into a single dramatic act.

Five swords in the sky

expansionDrafted from Hutchinson, A Report of the Kingdom of Congo, and of the Surrounding Countries (1881)

Portuguese ships reached the mouth of the Congo river in the 1480s, sent south by King João II in search of a route to the Indies rather than a new ally. What followed was neither conquest nor a simple trading arrangement: a king's own conversion, a rebellion it triggered, and a succession war between his two sons that the Kongo court's own storytellers would go on retelling, in increasingly elaborate form, for generations.

A prince converts before his king does

The first Portuguese to stay any length of time at the mouth of the Zaire found a ready audience in the Mani Soyo, the provincial lord who governed the river port and who happened to be uncle to the reigning king, Nzinga a Nkuwu. Impressed by the Portuguese and persuaded by the priests traveling with them, the Mani Soyo accepted baptism in 1491, before the king himself had committed to anything - and carried the new faith to court himself, urging his nephew to receive it too. The king sent to Portugal for priests, vestments and everything else needed to establish the church properly, and for a time the plan was to build in stone. A rebellion among river peoples living along the Zaire's upper islands forced a change of plan: with the king needing to lead troops in person to put it down, the stone church was abandoned half finished and a hasty wooden one raised instead, so the king could be baptized without further delay. He took the name João, after Portugal's own king, and his wife took the name Leonora; the rebellion was suppressed shortly after, and the king's elder son - who had already converted during the crisis, taking the name Afonso - returned to court at the head of the victorious army.

A second son who would not convert

João's own conversion did not hold every member of his family. His younger son, governor of a separate province and known in the Portuguese sources by the name Mpanzu a Kitima, refused the new religion outright, along with the single-wife rule it demanded of a polygamous court, and gathered around him nobles equally reluctant to give up the old ways. Afonso, meanwhile, threw himself into the new faith with a zeal that made him enemies of his own: rivals at court convinced the aging king that his elder son's Christian enthusiasm was cover for a plot to seize the throne early, and João stripped him of his province before an ally's intervention won a reprieve. The suspicion was never fully dispelled. When João died, his wife concealed the death for three days, using the kingdom's own relay-runner network to summon Afonso in secret so he could reach the capital before his rival learned the throne was open at all - a message that, by the account handed down at court, covered roughly two hundred miles in a single day and two nights.

A war decided in a matter of days

Mpanzu answered his brother's succession by marching on the capital with, by the same account, nearly two hundred thousand men against a defending force of barely ten thousand, many of them recent and uncertain converts. Afonso's own supporters wavered before the fighting even began, and it was the elderly Mani Soyo - by then, the tradition held, a hundred years old and still willing to take up arms himself - who talked the wavering defenders back into the city. The battle that followed, as the Kongo court's own storytellers told it for generations afterward, turned on something no army could supply: a vision that appeared over the city at the height of the fighting, which defenders and attackers alike described afterward as a blinding light and, within it, a woman in white and a mounted knight bearing a red cross. Whatever actually decided two clashes on consecutive mornings, Mpanzu's much larger force broke and fled both times. On the third day he tried to force a river crossing his own men had staked with poisoned spikes during the earlier fighting - a trap set for the defenders that, in the confusion of his own retreat, killed him instead.

What the winning side built afterward

With his brother dead and his rivals at court either submitted or fled, Afonso spent his first months as king consolidating what the war had won him: he ordered a proper stone church raised on the site of the wooden one his father had hastily built, and had every household in the capital surrender its own religious images for burning in a single bonfire on the same ground where the battle against his brother had turned. The war itself, and the vision the court came to credit with winning it, became the founding story of a Christian kingship Afonso would spend the next thirty-seven years building into something considerably more consequential than his father's brief and contested conversion had managed.

The convert who reigned longest

peakDrafted from (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1992)

Nzinga Mbemba took the throne in 1506 the same way most of Kongo's kings before him had - as one faction's candidate in a war between rival houses, this one fought between lords of the north and lords loyal to the capital and the south. What made his victory different from the ones before it was what he did with it afterward: a reign of thirty-seven years, the longest in the kingdom's recorded history, built around a religious and political transformation no earlier king had attempted.

A Christian since before he was king

Nzinga Mbemba had converted to Christianity in 1491, fifteen years before he took the throne, and had protected the handful of missionaries then working in Kongo while he was still only a provincial governor and a faction leader rather than a king. Once he won the succession war, he took the baptismal name Afonso and moved quickly to make the religion he had already practiced privately into the religion of the state. The Catholic Church became Kongo's official faith under his direction, and in 1518 his own son Henrique was sent to Rome and consecrated a bishop - the first sub-Saharan African to hold that office, presiding over the young church Afonso had built until 1536.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1992) · Metropolitan Museum of Art · CC0

Opening a country, and paying for it

Afonso's conversion was never only a religious act. It opened Kongo formally to Portugal, and with it to a wave of European technicians and missionaries whose skills and knowledge he set out to acquire on his own kingdom's terms. He paid for them with the country's own exports - ivory, raffia cloth, and increasingly, from 1514 onward, captives sold into the slave trade the Portuguese were building along the whole coast.

The revenue supported more than churches and technicians. It fed an appetite for imported fabric, wine and other luxury goods that spread fast through Kongo's nobility, until by the end of Afonso's own reign nearly the entire income the trade generated was being absorbed by exactly that kind of consumption rather than reinvested in the state. Afonso's own kingdom had, by the time he died in 1543, grown dependent on a trade whose long-term costs he had already begun to protest - a protest that is its own story, and did not succeed.

A house too large to hold together

The same reign that built Kongo's Christian state also planted the seed of its later unraveling. Afonso, like the kings before him, practiced polygamy on a scale that produced an enormous royal house - by his own reckoning, three hundred grandsons and great-grandsons after twenty-five years on the throne, and by his death a great many more. Every king who followed him for the rest of Kongo's history descended from one or another of his three principal daughters, and the ever-multiplying number of descendants with a plausible claim to the throne turned the ordinary factional politics of a Kongo succession into something considerably more combustible. The convert who built Kongo's longest and most consequential reign also built the royal house whose internal rivalries would eventually help tear the kingdom apart.

A country run on shells and ancestors

aside?What aside meansDrafted from (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1992)

Kongo's own capital, Mbanza Kongo, sat at the center of a state built on three distinct legal categories of person - nobility, villagers, and slaves

• and on a language that made the distinction explicit: the same vocabulary that meant "civilization" and "politeness" was tied to town life, while "rusticity" described the countryside, and a single word served for both "slave" and "war captive," naming exactly where the enslaved were expected to come from.

(ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1992) · Thomas Astley · Public domain

A nobility bound by marriage rather than land

Kongo's nobles held no hereditary claim to their offices. The king appointed provincial governors and dismissed them at will, with two standing exceptions: Mbata, whose own ruling family had negotiated a permanent claim to govern itself in the alliances that built the kingdom, and, after 1491, Soyo, which controlled the kingdom's Atlantic port. Every other province's governorship was the king's to give and take away, and at every succession the entire hierarchy of the nobility was redefined around whoever held the throne.

What held that shifting nobility together was marriage rather than land. Succession to village headship ran through the mother's line, and the king's own principal wife had to come from the ruling family of Mbata - the same family whose alliance had helped build the kingdom generations earlier. Mbata's ruling house, in turn, married into the king's own kin, and a branch of that same family, the Nsaku Vunda, supplied the kingdom's senior religious official, the Mani Kabunga, who tended the spirit cult of the capital itself. A royal council of twelve, four of its seats held by women representing the clans of the king's own grandparents, formally carried out the election that put each new king on the throne.

A currency the king controlled

Kongo's economy ran on nzimbu, small shells gathered from the fishing grounds around the Island of Luanda - itself part of the kingdom - and issued as currency under direct royal control. When the Portuguese began importing competing shell currencies in the early seventeenth century, the nzimbu lost two-thirds of its value within a matter of years, and the king lost a matching share of his own revenue with it. Kongo's kings treated the currency as a lever of state power precisely because it was one: a population that trusted and needed a shell only the king could authorize was a population whose economic life ran, in the end, through the throne.

A king who was himself sacred

Kongo's religious life centered on a concept called nkisi - a term the Christian missionaries later adopted wholesale, translating "church" as "the house of the nkisi" and "the Bible" as "the book of the nkisi" rather than inventing new vocabulary for ideas Kongo already had words for. Three cults structured the concept in practice: ancestor worship, centered on the royal burial ground; the worship of territorial spirits, tended by the Mani Kabunga at the capital; and the worship of royal charms.

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh · (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1992) · Unknown · Public domain

The king himself stood at the center of all three. Addressed as Nzambi mpungu, the Supreme Creator, he was credited with guaranteeing the fertility of the land and the arrival of the rains through his own person, and was himself understood, in the most literal sense the word carried, to be the nkisi of the country. It was an office built to make an ordinary succession dispute an argument over who held divine favor as much as political power - and Kongo's history is, in no small part, the record of how often that argument turned violent.

A king's own protest

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Monumenta Missionaria Africana (trans. Basil Davidson)

Afonso I did not object to trade with Portugal. He had built his own reign on it - the technicians, missionaries and imported luxuries that sustained his court all arrived on Portuguese ships, paid for with Kongo's own exports. What he objected to, in a letter written to Portugal's King João III on 6 July 1526, was a specific and by then uncontrollable consequence of that trade: Portuguese merchants and their local agents were seizing Kongo's own free subjects, including noblemen and the sons of noblemen, and selling them into the same slave trade Afonso's own treasury had helped build.

Depopulation, in the king's own words

Afonso's letter describes a country being stripped of its own people by men he calls, in his own words, "thieves and men of bad conscience," working under cover of night specifically so their victims would not be recognized and rescued. "We cannot reckon how great the damage is," he wrote, "since the mentioned merchants are taking every day our natives, sons of the land and the sons of our noblemen and vassals and our relatives... our country is being completely depopulated." It is not the language of a ruler managing an economic policy. It is the language of a ruler watching a trade he had once controlled slip entirely out of his hands.

A total ban, asked for and refused

Afonso's proposed remedy was total rather than partial: he asked João III to stop sending merchants and trade goods to Kongo altogether, keeping only priests, a few teachers, and the wine and flour needed for the Catholic mass his own court had adopted. "It is our will," the letter states plainly, "that in these Kingdoms there should not be any trade of slaves nor outlet for them." No source records a Portuguese reply granting the request, and none was going to come. By 1526 the Atlantic slave trade was already the economic engine linking Portugal, its colonies in the Americas, and every port along the West African coast it controlled, and no single African king's objection - however sincerely meant, and however senior the king - carried the weight to stop it.

A protest that outlived its own author

The letter did not end the trade Afonso protested, and it did not even end his own kingdom's participation in it - Kongo's court continued exporting captives for the rest of his reign and for two and a half centuries after his death, under kings who inherited both his throne and the same dependence he had tried and failed to break. What the letter did leave behind was a written record, in a king's own hand, that the human cost of the trade was visible and named by its victims' own sovereign from nearly its earliest years - not a case of an African ruler failing to grasp what the trade would do to his country, but of one who saw it clearly and could not stop it.

Warriors from nowhere

contractionDrafted from (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1992)

Afonso I's successors inherited a kingdom already leaning on a trade he had tried to stop, and Diogo I's own attempts to limit Portuguese influence after him did nothing to reverse the trend. Kongo's relative position in the region weakened steadily through the mid-sixteenth century, especially against Ndongo to the south, which was gaining ground of its own through trade its own rulers ran outside Kongo's control. In 1561 Kongo cut off relations with Portugal almost entirely - and then, in 1566 and 1567, lost two kings in quick succession to a war with the Tio kingdom of Pool. A kingdom already destabilized by the loss of two rulers in two years had no capacity left to absorb what came next.

An invasion nobody can fully explain

Warrior bands the sources call Jaga - a name used broadly for nomadic fighting groups rather than naming any single, identifiable people - swept in from the direction of Mbata and the country south of Pool and routed Kongo's royal army outright. The court fled to an island in the lower Zaire river, and large numbers of Kongo's own people, taken as refugees or captives in the chaos, were sold into slavery by the very invaders who had displaced them.

No source establishes who the Jaga actually were. What can be reconstructed is a plausible motive: the invasion followed closely on the near-total collapse of the slave trade after 1561, and many of the fighters swelling the Jaga ranks appear to have been ordinary villagers who had grown weary of Kongo's own nobility and saw an opportunity to seize a larger share of the wealth the trade generated for themselves. Once victorious, the invaders were found selling captives on the coast just as the nobility they had displaced once had.

Rescued at the price of a rival kingdom

Kongo's own king had no army left capable of retaking the country, and appealed to Portugal for help. A Portuguese expeditionary force reconquered Kongo between 1571 and 1573, though the troops did not fully withdraw until 1575 or 1576 - and the price of that rescue changed the balance of power in the whole region permanently. The same soldiers who had restored Kongo's king used the campaign as the occasion to found a new Portuguese colony, named Angola after the royal title of Kongo's own southern neighbor, Ndongo. Portuguese traders began working the Loango coast in numbers that same year. Kongo's regional hegemony - built by Afonso I's line over two generations - did not survive the rescue that saved Kongo itself.

A province that would not come back

contractionDrafted from (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1992)

Kongo did not collapse after the Jaga invasion and the loss of its regional hegemony - it recovered a working, sound state, and even expanded eastward in the decades that followed. But recovery was partial, and the losses that did not reverse were the ones that mattered most for the kingdom's long-term position. The Island of Luanda, with its fishing grounds and its nzimbu shells, was lost in 1622, along with territory in Luanda town itself, and a Kongo army sent to recover ground in the south was defeated at Bumbe by a combined force of Angolan and Jaga troops. Only a general mobilization across the kingdom finally brought that particular war to a stop.

Diplomacy in place of an army

What Kongo could no longer win by force, its kings pursued instead through diplomacy on a genuinely international scale: an alliance with the Vatican, a deliberate strategy of playing Portugal against Spain, and eventually playing both of those against the Dutch Republic. It worked well enough to hold off further Portuguese encroachment for decades - but it could not prevent the kingdom's most economically vital province from simply walking away.

(ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1992) · Jacob van Meurs · Public domain

Soyo goes its own way

Soyo held the port of Mpinda, the maritime gateway that had linked Mbanza Kongo to the Atlantic trade since 1491, and its prince had long held a guaranteed voice in electing each new king of Kongo in exchange for that strategic position. In 1636 a royal election went against Soyo's own preferred candidate, and the province's electors, already weakened by the loss, found themselves unable to stop what came next: Soyo declared effective independence, keeping only its ceremonial vote in future elections while answering to no one in how it actually governed itself. Kongo's own maritime lifeline was now sovereign territory belonging to someone else.

An uneasy peace under a new king

Garcia II became king in 1641 in circumstances unusual even by Kongo's own standards - the electors who would ordinarily have confirmed his succession had been weakened enough by the Soyo affair that he took power without needing their formal endorsement at all. That same year the Dutch captured Luanda from Portugal, and Garcia II, like Ndongo's own Queen Nzinga to the south, allied with the Dutch against the Portuguese Crown. Large numbers of Italian Capuchin missionaries arrived in Kongo from 1645 onward, and their presence helped Garcia II reach an accommodation with Portugal even as the military standoff continued elsewhere in the region.

The accommodation did not hold. A Brazilian fleet drove the Dutch out of Luanda in 1648, and the disagreements left unresolved by Garcia II's own treaty with Portugal set the stage for the war that would follow his reign

• a war that, unlike the Jaga invasion seventy years earlier, Kongo would not recover from at all.

The defeat that could not be recovered from

endDrafted from (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1992)

The disagreements Garcia II left unresolved with Portugal broke into open war under his successor, Antonio I, and this time an Angolan army, not a band of Jaga raiders, was on the other side. Antonio I assembled his nobles and gave battle at Mbwila in 1665 - a defeat total enough that contemporary observers called it the greatest battle of the century. Antonio I himself died on the field, along with a great many of his nobility, in a single afternoon that cost Kongo more of its ruling class at once than any earlier war in its history had.

A second battle Portugal could not build on

Kongo's collapse was not immediate. A second Portuguese army, pressing its advantage, was itself disastrously beaten at Soyo five years later, in 1670, and Angola abandoned any further attempt to conquer Kongo outright. Mbwila was not followed by a Portuguese conquest of the kingdom. It was followed by something that did more lasting damage: a Kongo with no clear king and a royal house too large, after a century and a half of descendants tracing their claim back to Afonso I, to settle the succession peacefully among itself.

A capital that emptied out

The disputed succession hardened quickly into open civil war between rival noble houses, and the war's cost fell first on Mbanza Kongo itself. The capital was destroyed in the fighting in 1666, the year after Mbwila, and by 1678 it stood completely abandoned - the town that every institution of the kingdom had been built around, from the royal council to the currency to the cult of the territorial spirit, now simply empty. The nobility that had lived there for generations scattered into the countryside to contend for provincial power instead, a way of life most of them had never had to learn. A number of noble families crossed the river northward entirely, founding small principalities of their own in Mayombe and the country between the Zaire and Niari rivers rather than compete for what remained of the kingdom they had left behind.

Soyo, already independent since 1636, survived the collapse better than anywhere else in the old kingdom - though even Soyo struggled to keep its own territory from fragmenting further, losing several of its own outlying districts in the process. Everywhere else, the centralized state Afonso I had built a century and a half earlier had, by 1678, simply ceased to have anywhere to be centralized in.

A prophetess and an empty capital

afterlifeDrafted from (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1992)

For twenty-six years after Mbanza Kongo's abandonment, no single ruler held the town or the country it once governed. What ended that interval was not an army but a prophetess: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, a young noblewoman who in 1704 began preaching a reworked Christianity she called Antonianism, built around the claim that Saint Anthony had entered her body and spoken through her against the endless factional war consuming Kongo's own nobles.

A saint invoked against the nobility's own war

Kimpa Vita's preaching rejected the European missionaries and the racial hierarchy of the Portuguese-aligned church without rejecting Christianity itself, and her core political message was simple and aimed squarely at the crisis at hand: the rival claimants to Kongo's throne should stop fighting, restore a single king, and repopulate Mbanza Kongo. It found a genuine popular following - remarkable given that Kimpa Vita herself came from the lesser nobility rather than a background that would ordinarily command that kind of authority - and she used it to persuade one of the rival claimants to actually occupy the abandoned capital, where she crowned him herself with a black Antonian crown of her own design.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1992) · Metropolitan Museum of Art · CC0

Burned as a heretic, believed for years afterward

The claimant Kimpa Vita had crowned did not hold power for long. In 1706 a rival claimant, Pedro II, captured her and had her burned as a heretic - a verdict that ended her life without ending her movement, which continued to find adherents for several years afterward despite having lost the prophetess who had founded it.

A king comes back, but not the kingdom

It was Pedro IV, not Pedro II, who eventually succeeded in restoring and repopulating Mbanza Kongo, in 1709 - thirty-one years after the town had been left empty, and five years after Kimpa Vita first began preaching that exact outcome. A king once again occupied the capital his predecessors had ruled from for three and a half centuries. But forty years of fragmentation could not be reversed by one reoccupation. The kingdom Pedro IV presided over was a titular unity laid over a country still governed, in practice, as a collection of separate principalities, many of them still contending with each other independently of whatever the king in Mbanza Kongo claimed. The throne Afonso I's descendants had spent two centuries fighting over had been returned to its old capital. The centralized state that throne had once commanded was not.