Kingdom of Mutapa

The Mutapa Empire, Mwenemutapa, the lord of the conquered land, was the Shona empire of the Zimbabwean Plateau, lasting from about 1430 to 1760. When Great Zimbabwe faded, its princes carried the stone-building tradition north to the Zambezi valley, and Mutota founded a realm that ran at its height from the Kalahari to the Indian Ocean, from Zambezi to Limpopo, trading gold and ivory through Swahili middlemen to the world. The Portuguese came for the mines: from the 1630s they pried the empire apart with garrisons, puppet kings and fomented succession wars, turning Monomotapa from a power into a rumour on European maps. The Rozvi cage closed from the south, and by 1760 the empire that had ruled the plateau was a rump of quarrelling chiefs. The dynasty itself lingered, its last chief killed by the Portuguese in 1917, but the stone walls of Great Zimbabwe had already outlived every king who ordered them built.