Kingdom of Mutapa

The Kingdom of Mutapa, also known as the Mutapa Empire or by the royal title Munhumutapa, was a Shona state that emerged on the Zimbabwean Plateau in the fifteenth century, with tradition holding it was founded by a breakaway faction from the earlier Kingdom of Zimbabwe. At its height the kingdom controlled trade in gold, ivory and copper across a wide stretch of what is now northern Zimbabwe and central Mozambique, channeling goods to Swahili coast ports such as Sofala for export into the Indian Ocean trade network. Portuguese traders and missionaries made sustained contact with the Mutapa court from the sixteenth century onward, and Portugal came to exert growing influence over its rulers through military intervention and trade concessions. The kingdom persisted in a weakened and increasingly fragmented form under Portuguese pressure into the late nineteenth century.