Kingdom of Kongo

The Kingdom of Kongo was a Central African state that existed from around 1390 to 1914 in territory spanning parts of what are now northern Angola, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Gabon, traditionally founded by Lukeni lua Nimi, who united several smaller polities and established his capital at Mbanza Kongo. The kingdom entered sustained contact with Portugal beginning in 1483, and King Nzinga a Nkuwu converted to Christianity in 1491, taking the baptismal name Joao I; his son Afonso I, who ruled from 1509 to 1543, further consolidated Kongo as a Christian kingdom that exchanged ambassadors with Portugal and the Vatican while also becoming deeply entangled in the growing Atlantic slave trade. Kongo combined a central monarchy at Mbanza Kongo, renamed Sao Salvador, with a set of semi-autonomous provinces, and it experienced periods of civil war and fragmentation, particularly after a catastrophic defeat by Portuguese forces at the Battle of Mbwila in 1665. Though reduced in power and repeatedly divided among rival claimants afterward, the kingdom persisted in a diminished form under Portuguese colonial overlordship until the 1914 death of the last recognized king, Manuel III, ended its formal existence.