Kingdom of Kongo Army

The army of the Kingdom of Kongo, the centralized Central African state whose kings could mobilize forces from provincial governors and their subordinates, grew alongside the kingdom's own founding and territorial consolidation from the fourteenth century onward, with campaigns of conquest producing captured populations who were forcibly relocated to the royal capital. Kongo's military capacity was substantial by the standards of the region and era, illustrated by an engagement at the capital Sao Salvador in 1781 in which some 30,000 soldiers reportedly fought on a single side. The kingdom fought a series of wars against Portuguese incursion, decisively defeating and driving Portuguese forces from the country near Mbanda Kasi in January 1623 during the First Kongo-Portuguese War, but suffering its most catastrophic reversal at the Battle of Mbwila in 1665, when Portuguese forces won their first victory over Kongo since 1622, killed King Antonio I and much of his court, and took large numbers of captives into slavery. Kongo forces recovered some ground five years later when the province of Soyo defeated a Portuguese invasion at the Battle of Kitombo in 1670, a victory that helped preserve Kongolese independence even as the kingdom's central authority fractured into prolonged internal civil conflict in the decades that followed.