Mutapa, 1600–1660

Gatsi Rusere had been Mutapa since the late 1580s. After invaders from across the Zambezi slipped away in 1597, he had his uncle Ningomoxa, his general, put to death for failing to catch them. Ningomoxa's kin and friends, the foremost men of the kingdom, rose against him. Gatsi turned to the Portuguese traders at his gold fairs, who had guns.

In his camp on the Mazoe, before Madeira's assembled men and the notary Miguel Nunes, Gatsi gave the king of Portugal every mine of gold, copper, iron, lead and tin in his kingdom, provided the king kept him on his throne and sent forces to retake his court and destroy Matuzvianye. The silver he gave to Madeira, who gave it to his king. Gatsi signed with three crosses and handed Madeira two sons to raise as Christians.

Chiraramuro, one of the lords who rose after Ningomoxa's death, seized most of Antauara. Gatsi marched against him with the Portuguese of Masapa. Chiraramuro fled without a fight to a chief he took for a friend, who cut off his head and sent it to Gatsi rather than be blamed for sheltering him. His death did not end the rising.

Matuzvianye, said to have been a cowherd, had been one of Chiraramuro's captains. He made himself head of all the rebels and in 1606 styled himself king of Mukaranga. He shared the kingdom out among his lieutenants so that each could make war on Gatsi from his own side, and kept for himself the Matarira mountains, between Masapa and the court.

Anconhe held Antauara for the rising. When the captain of Masapa came against him with the traders and their slaves, he would not fight: the road and the land, he sent word, belonged to him and to the Portuguese, whose friend he was. He kept his word to them and went on fighting Gatsi, until Madeira's army routed him in 1607.

Francisco da Cunha was captain of Masapa, the chief gold fair, where a Portuguese captain licensed and taxed the traders in the Mutapa's name. When Gatsi asked his help against Chiraramuro, Cunha gathered all the Portuguese he could and joined the royal army; the rebel fled before it arrived, and the army burned his villages.

António Ferreira, captain of Masapa during the rebels' war, marched on Anconhe and turned back when Anconhe offered friendship: the traders' road was safe while the war on Gatsi went on. Refused help from Sena, Gatsi then threatened to plunder every Portuguese in his kingdom. Ferreira passed his envoys on to Diogo Simões Madeira.

Diogo Simões Madeira, a trader of Tete who had fought for Gatsi before, gathered the Portuguese of Sena, Tete and the fairs, with their slaves, into an army and won several fights for him. Gatsi promised him all the silver mines in his kingdom; Madeira then talked him into granting the crown every other mine as well.

In 1608 Gatsi marched on Barue, which had stopped paying him tribute, and on the way had the lord of the Mongas killed as a friend of Matuzvianye. The Mongas rose, killed Gatsi's eldest son and wounded him. Beaten at Barue too, he came back to Madeira's fort at Inyabanzo, rested there three months, then moved to Chidima, on the road to Chicova.

Gatsi sent a new Ningomoxa, the second man of the kingdom, to camp beside the Portuguese fort at Masapa and guard it from the rebels of Quizinga. He stayed six months. No kuruva came, and the traders bought gold without paying Gatsi his dues, so he ordered an empata: Portuguese goods were seized across the kingdom, and traders who resisted were killed.

With Gatsi away at Barue, Matuzvianye took the whole of Mukaranga and pushed as far as Inyabanzo, next to Tete. In 1609 the Portuguese and Gatsi's army beat him in the field and took back the royal town; his night attack on it failed. Driven from the Matarira mountains, he was stabbed to death by a friend whom Gatsi had bribed.

Madeira drove Matuzvianye's men out of Inyabanzo with fifty guns and four thousand of Tete's fighters and built a fort there. In June 1609 Pereira made him captain-general of the field army: with over a hundred guns he took Gatsi to Chicova, where the local lord handed over three small bars of silver and vanished, then fought Gatsi back into his royal town.

Archbishop of Goa and acting governor of Portuguese India, Frei Aleixo de Menezes received the king's order of 1608 to send five hundred men for the silver of Chicova. He could not raise them. He made Nuno Álvares Pereira captain-general of the conquest and gave him about a hundred soldiers.

Pereira reached the rivers in March 1609. He sent thirty soldiers to guard Gatsi at Chidima and in June put Madeira at the head of the field army, with the viceroy's present for Gatsi. Once Gatsi was back in his royal town, his envoys came down to Sena to hand over the silver mines, but Pereira was ordered to India before he could take them.

Rui Lourenço de Távora, viceroy of India from 1609, gave the conquest of the mines to Estêvão de Ataíde under a contract that promised him high honours if he succeeded. The king later ruled that Távora had no power to promise them and ordered the contract annulled.

Ataíde, a former captain of Mozambique, met Gatsi's envoys at Sena: they had come to hand over the mines and take back the kuruva. He paid nothing. When Gatsi later offered him Chicova in peace for the kuruva, Ataíde sent the envoys away unanswered and spoke of war. Called to defend Mozambique against the Dutch in 1612 and recalled in 1613, he died at Mozambique.

Diogo Carvalho built a wooden fort at Masapa with fifty soldiers and promised Gatsi cloth for the mines, which he never sent. When the empata struck, he made a secret pact with the rebels of Quizinga and at dawn fell on the camp of Ningomoxa, who had guarded him for six months. Then he abandoned Masapa and withdrew to Tete, leaving the country in arms against the Portuguese.

Muzura ruled the Maravi north of the Zambezi; Portuguese reports said he had once led workers on a settler's plantation and was a famous hunter. In 1608 the Portuguese recruited some four thousand of his warriors for the war in Gatsi's kingdom, and in return helped him against his Maravi rivals, making him the strongest of their rulers.

Left the conquest with no money, Madeira took cloth from the stores of the captain of Mozambique to pay his men and set out from Sena on 10 August 1613. Chombe barred the river. Once that war was won, Gatsi offered him Chicova for cloth. Madeira paid four thousand cruzados' worth, reached Chicova on 8 May 1614 and built Fort São Miguel.

When Madeira went down to Tete on 24 June 1614, Diogo Teixeira Barroso stayed at São Miguel with forty-four Portuguese soldiers. He took in Gatsi's fugitive son and, at the son's word, held the Chicova lord Cherema in bonds. He also shot dead the son of a neighbouring lord, Inhamocucura, over a quarrel in a millet field. On 18 March 1615 his garrison beat off Gatsi's army.

Dom Diogo, Gatsi's younger son, stayed in Madeira's house after his brother was taken home. He spoke, read and wrote Portuguese and served at mass in the fort. At Chicova he told a friar he had seen bars of silver brought to his father from the mountain of Nobiry, upriver in Beza, where the Mutapa got his own silver.

Gaspar Bocarro, an old settler of the rivers and Madeira's friend, lent two thousand cruzados to keep the fort going and offered to carry its silver to the king by land, avoiding Mozambique, where Madeira's enemies might seize it. He left Tete in March 1616, crossed Muzura's country and reached Kilwa in fifty-three days. War in Persia stopped him at Mombasa, and he came back by sea.

With no supplies, the garrison lived on tamarinds rolled in ashes. When the judge came up the river with a hundred and fifty guns, Madeira, fearing arrest, crossed to the fort of Santo António opposite, and the judge turned back. On 17 August 1616 the last soldiers left São Miguel, and Gatsi's people burned it. Proclaimed an outlaw, Madeira took refuge with Quitambo near Sena.

Gatsi sent his nephew Inhaxangue, a great lord, to put Madeira in possession of Chicova in 1614. On the road he stood on the Mutapa's rights against the chief of Chidima. At Chicova he told the local lord, before everyone, that the land now belonged to the king of Portugal and its mines must be shown. The lord hid and never came back.

Dom Filipe, baptized at Tete, had been called home by his father and kept there for years in Shona dress; Gatsi had the servants who went with him on one escape put to death. In 1614 he reached São Miguel in under three days. There he summoned Cherema, claiming to bring his father's orders, rebuked him for hiding the mines and had him held until he showed them.

Gatsi did not want the silver found: his diviners warned it would be the end of his kingdom. His son's flight, the jailing of the Chicova lord and a neighbour's murdered son turned him against the fort, and in March 1615 his army of river Botonga attacked it; when it failed he disowned it. In 1616 the judge Fonseca Pinto told him Madeira was a rebel, and Gatsi made war on him again.

Chombe, a powerful chief on the river between Sena and Tete, owed Sena a yearly rent in millet. Egged on by Sena settlers who said Madeira had no authority, he refused it, kept the runaway slaves of Sena and Tete, tried to seize Madeira's boats and demanded a toll to pass. He had a hundred and fifty guns and two cannon, bought from Portuguese traders.

Quitambo, a powerful chief and friend of the Portuguese, brought his fighters to the siege of Chombe's stockade, beside Sena's men under the chief Samacanqua. After two and a half months it fell on 17 November 1613 and Chombe fled; Madeira granted Quitambo the stockade and the land for the rent Chombe had refused. In 1616 Quitambo sheltered the outlawed Madeira.

Cherema, a crippled man who had brought Gatsi a lump of Chicova silver, was sent by Gatsi to show the mines, and Madeira made him lord of Chicova. He dug up only a few pieces and said spirits showed him silver in dreams. Madeira beat and jailed him. Held again on Dom Filipe's word, in April 1615 he led the soldiers, bound, to rich ore.

In 1616 Muzura received Gaspar Bocarro at his town, Maravi, for fifteen days, took his gifts of cloth and his bed, gave him ivory and food, and sent guides ahead with his word to chiefs on the road to Kilwa, some of whom obeyed him. Bocarro's journal is the first written account of the Maravi kingdom.

The viceroy sent the judge Francisco da Fonseca Pinto with cloth and stores to supply Chicova and verify the silver. He reached Quilimane in May 1616. By the account of Madeira's friends he sold the goods for gold instead, seized Madeira's lands, chained his nephew, raided his slaves, forbade anyone to supply the fort and told Gatsi that Madeira was a rebel. Then he pronounced the silver a fable.

Frei Francisco do Avelar, a Dominican at Tete, had baptized Gatsi's younger son as Dom Diogo. In July 1615 he set out with three pieces of Chicova ore and the soldiers' sworn statements, by way of Mozambique and Goa, to Lisbon and Madrid, where the silver delighted the king and his court.

Frei João dos Santos, an old Dominican of these rivers and the author of Ethiópia Oriental, answered the garrison's plea for a priest: thirteen soldiers had died without the sacraments. He reached São Miguel at the end of January 1616, shared its famine, and in August stripped its altar when it was abandoned. What he told António Bocarro is the chronicle's source for these years.

The silver in Madrid brought a new plan. Pereira, then commanding in Ceylon, was named governor and conqueror of the Cuama rivers and of Monomotapa, with miners and money promised from Lisbon. He reached the Zambezi in 1619 and sent envoys to Gatsi, who renewed his donation of the mines.

Cristóvão Tirado, a Castilian miner, went with Pereira to Chicova to turn the loose ore into a working mine. Quarrels and poor results ended the search, and no mine was found. In 1622 the king ordered Pereira recalled and the conquest abandoned: the captain of Mozambique was to win the Mutapa back with the customary presents.

Lisbon condemned the judge's proceedings and ordered Madeira restored. In 1618 he raised men for a new march on Chicova before Pereira's appointment superseded him. The king kept promising him a noble's rank and a commandery if he found the mines, but in 1624 the viceroy turned against him over proposals he had made and planned to arrest him.

With Portuguese help Muzura defeated the Lundu, the Maravi ruler of the lower Shire, in 1622, and became the undisputed power north of the Zambezi. Once Gatsi was dead he turned on his old allies: he invaded southward, attacked Sena and Tete, and was beaten back.

Gatsi died in 1623 or 1624, master of his kingdom, with no Portuguese mine working in it. During his wars Barue and Manyika had probably ceased to recognize the Mutapa as overlord. His death opened a quarrel over the succession inside the royal house.

Nyambo Kapararidze, Gatsi's son, took the throne in 1623 or 1624, passing over the house of Negomo, whose senior man, his uncle Mavura, claimed it by custom. He was hostile to the Portuguese and jealous of Mavura, whom the friars favoured. In November 1628, soon after receiving the kuruva, he had the envoy who brought it killed and ordered every Portuguese in his land killed and robbed.

Among the prisoners of the war of 1628–29 was a royal child, sent to Goa and baptized Dom Miguel. The Dominicans called him Kapararidze's brother, the viceroy's office a king's son; his kinship is uncertain. Raised by the friars, by later Dominican accounts he joined their order and died as vicar of a convent in Goa.

Mavura, eldest son of the former Mutapa Negomo, was Kapararidze's uncle and, by the custom that passed the throne between houses, the rightful heir. Instructed by the Dominican Manuel Sardinha, he leaned towards the friars' faith. When Kapararidze turned on the Portuguese in 1628 he took refuge with them at the fairs, and their army, on the friars' advice, proclaimed him Mutapa.

Jerónimo de Barros, a married settler of Tete, carried the kuruva up to Kapararidze's court in November 1628 as the envoy of the captain of Mozambique, Nuno Álvares Pereira. On 17 November Kapararidze had him and his whole company killed.

André Ferreira, captain of the gates, the Portuguese officer at the royal court, was warned by servants of the order to kill the Portuguese. He fled that night to Masapa, readied its old stockade and sent word to the traders across the country. The Christians and their people, Mavura among them, gathered at Masapa and Luanze and held off the royal army.

The army that marched up from Sena and Tete chose Manuel Gomes Serrão as its captain-major. Under him it beat Kapararidze and then threw back two counterattacks. On 24 May 1629 Serrão read the treaty of vassalage to Mavura before the assembled army and signed it with the friars and the other captains. In 1631 the king commended his conduct to Mavura.

Mavura declared himself and his descendants vassals of the king of Portugal. He opened his country to friars and traders, let the Portuguese search for and dig mines, above all silver, promised to expel the Muslim traders within a year, gave up the lands of Tete and bound himself to send gold to each new captain of Mozambique. Thirty Portuguese musketeers were posted at his court.

Frei Manuel Sardinha, a Dominican, instructed Mavura in the faith before he came to power, and stayed at his side as counsellor through his reign. Through him the friars made the claimant of the house of Negomo their candidate for the throne.

Frei Luís do Espírito Santo, vicar of Tete and born in Mozambique, raised the settlers of Sena and their African fighters and marched them up to relieve the fairs. After the battles of December 1628 and May 1629 he put Mavura in possession of the kingdom, wrote Mavura's name under the treaty, and some eight months later baptized him Filipe.

Pereira was captain of Mozambique for a third time from 1627. He sent Barros up with the kuruva in 1628. After the victory his men held a royal child prisoner, whom Pereira handed to the new viceroy when he called at Mozambique on his way to Goa.

Miguel de Noronha, count of Linhares, viceroy of India from 1629, thought it unseemly to keep a king's son as a servant. At Goa he gave the boy to the Dominicans to educate, paid for his keep himself, and presented him to the king as a prisoner of the crown.

Beaten but never caught, Kapararidze gathered chiefs and the Muslim traders whom the treaty threatened with expulsion. At the end of 1631 he surprised the camp that held Mukaranga for Mavura, killing some four hundred Portuguese and thousands of their African soldiers. The king of Manyika declared for him. The Portuguese kept only Sena, Tete and a few fairs.

Routed on St John's day in 1632, Kapararidze lost his baggage, his women and his cattle, and fled north across the Zambezi. He was never captured, and for twenty years the threat of his return hung over Mavura's court.

Taken prisoner in the rising, Luís was brought before Kapararidze and told to make the customary obeisance. He refused, saying such homage was due to God alone, and was bound to a tree and speared to death.

Frei João da Trindade, a Dominican taken with Luís and badly wounded, was tortured and thrown over a precipice. Kapararidze was especially cruel to the friars who had made his rival king.

By the Dominican chronicle's account Manuel Sardinha gathered some twenty thousand fighters, mostly from Zambezi peoples hostile to the Karanga, and joined the captain's army against Kapararidze; another friar, Damião do Espírito Santo, brought six thousand more. The friars fought it as a holy war: if Kapararidze won, their mission was finished.

In 1631 Maravi warriors under a son of Muzura besieged Quelimane, the Portuguese post at the northern mouth of the Zambezi. The attack came in the same months as Kapararidze's rising, but the records do not show the two acting on a common plan. The relief from Mozambique broke the siege.

Diogo de Sousa de Meneses, captain of Mozambique for ten months, sailed for the rivers with two hundred arquebusiers, broke the siege of Quelimane, burned the Manyika king's town, had him killed and set up a vassal in his place. With three hundred guns and twelve thousand African soldiers he routed Kapararidze on St John's day, June 1632, on the field of Kapararidze's victory.

Linhares, by Meneses's account his mortal enemy, had the chief judge Paulo Rebello take the captaincy from him, citing complaints from the married settlers of Mozambique, whom Meneses had forced to go to war. When Meneses came to Goa to protest he was jailed for a year and a half. In 1636 the king ordered an inquiry.

In April 1631 the king wrote to Mavura, now baptized Filipe, sending him the habit of the Order of Christ and a licence to trade in cloth. Months later Kapararidze's surprise cost him Mukaranga. Meneses's victory gave it back in 1632, and he reigned from then on with a Portuguese garrison at his capital to defend him.

In 1633 and 1634 Linhares sent the king specimens of metals from the Mutapa's country, Manyika, Kiteve and Chicova. In February 1635 the king answered with a grand plan: forts at the river mouths, soldiers and settler families from Portugal, and a governor for the mines. Little of it ever arrived.

Andrés de Vides y Albarado, a Castilian, arrived on the Zambezi in 1633 at the head of a party of miners sent to find the silver at last. He wrote to the king with reports and specimens, but the searches at Chicova were brief and fruitless, and the enterprise ended with the deaths of the miners.

Filipe Mascarenhas, who took Meneses's captaincy, was charged for miners sent to the rivers and protested that the cost was not in his contract, which already bound him to pay forty thousand pardaos a year. Finding the post too heavy, he gave it up after a year. He later served as viceroy of India.

Pero da Silva, viceroy from December 1635, sent the king in 1637 and 1638 the results of trials of the mines made before the superintendent of the rivers, Francisco Figueira de Almeida. In February 1640 the king concluded that gold was best had by trading cloth to African diggers, and that nothing certain was known of the silver: the enterprise must wait for better times.

Thirty Portuguese soldiers went with Mavura wherever he went. Instead of the kuruva the crown now sent him a gift of equal value, as befitted a vassal, and he lost the right to tax the traders. He still kept the Karanga institutions and much of his authority, and granted land to the Portuguese as prazos.

After the war the Dominicans spread across the plateau: friars lived at the fairs, a church was begun at Mavura's residence, and they held lands on the rivers with their tithes, which the king confirmed in 1638 while denying them any right to the mines. By 1635 their vicar-general reported that they had baptized the emperor and his brothers.

From 1634 the lands around Tete and Sena were leased to settlers as prazos, crown estates. Around Sena alone some thirty thousand people lived on them. Their holders ruled the villages like chiefs, kept private armies of African retainers and raided the Mutapa's vassals for cattle and slaves.

Sisnando Dias Baião, a settler of Sena, helped the Kiteve ruler in a war, and by 1644 the Kiteve granted him the chiefdom of Gobira, later called Cheringoma, which carried Sena's lands down to Sofala. In the same year a prazo-holder's army restored the exiled ruler of Butua, far to the south-west: the estate holders now fought wars of their own.

Júlio Moniz da Silva, captain of Mozambique, wrote to the king in 1645 about the state of the rivers and the settlers' want of obedience. The viceroy answered that what the rivers lacked above all was more settlers, and in 1649 the king ordered more sent.

In 1649 a paper and a letter of submission from Mavura reached the king in Lisbon. The king told his viceroy, Filipe Mascarenhas, to see to Mavura's safety, because as a Christian he feared his own vassals. Across the Zambezi Kapararidze was still alive. Mavura died on 25 May 1652.

Sardinha stayed at Mavura's side; Siti later recalled that his father had governed with the friar's help. The Dominicans also raised Mavura's son Siti, who lived far from the court, as royal custom required, until his father died.

Siti Kazurukumusapa, Mavura's son, had been hostile to the Portuguese in his father's reign, but he feared a rising by Kapararidze and had the Portuguese of Dambarare stand ready before he came to court. On 4 August 1652 he was baptized Dom Domingos; ten days later he sealed a letter putting his kingdom under the king of Portugal's protection.

Siti's principal wife was baptized with him on 4 August 1652 and took the name Dona Luísa; two of their sons and many Karanga dignitaries were baptized the same day. Her Shona name is not recorded.

How long Siti reigned is disputed. On Rodrigues's reading he died in 1654 and the Portuguese installed a successor their reports leave unnamed, probably Cikate, baptized Dom João; on Mudenge's he died in 1655 and his uncle followed; on Beach's he ruled until 1663. In 1655 the king in Lisbon received letters from a Christian Mutapa asking for his favour.

Frei João de Melo, Siti's Dominican tutor, settled his affairs at Dambarare and joined him at court on 1 July 1652. On the feast of St Dominic he baptized the king and his household before the nobles and the soldiers of the garrison; the news was celebrated in Rome and in Lisbon.

Around 1659 a prazo-holder conquered Barue, the kingdom between Sena and Manyika. The captain of Sena, unwilling to let one estate holder grow so strong, backed Barue's ruler, the makombe, and the conqueror soon withdrew. A settler's private army could now take a kingdom, and it took a crown captain to make him give it back.