Debates about queen mothers in Africa usually stall on whether the honour paid to senior women translated into anything real. Kongo, with four centuries of unusually dense documentation, lets Thornton answer the question by following individual careers. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, elite Kongolese women worked through male kin, drawing authority from their standing as heads of lineages and from reputations for piety. The civil wars that followed the defeat at Mbwila in 1665 changed that. Women began holding territory in their own right, running provinces and marquisates from fortified strongholds while the old capital declined, and by the middle of the eighteenth century missionaries were describing whole regions as lands of the queen and one former province as a kingdom ruled by a woman. The limit held all the same, since Kongo never seated a woman on the throne, unlike neighbouring Ndongo and Matamba.