Kingdom of Zimbabwe

The Kingdom of Zimbabwe, sometimes called the Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe, was a Shona state in what is now southeastern Zimbabwe whose capital, the stone city of Great Zimbabwe, grew into the largest precolonial stone structure in southern Africa, with a population estimated around ten thousand at its height. Around 1300 the kingdom's capital displaced the earlier trading center of Mapungubwe as the region's dominant hub, exporting gold through Swahili Coast intermediaries into the wider Indian Ocean trading network. The core settlement was organized around the Great Enclosure, believed to have housed the royal court and served ritual functions, surrounded by a wider perimeter where the bulk of the population lived, and the wider Zimbabwe state encompassed more than 150 smaller satellite stone settlements, called zimbabwes, across a territory of roughly fifty thousand square kilometers. The kingdom declined in the fifteenth century, and its ruling lineage's authority fragmented into successor states including the Kingdom of Mutapa to the north.