The kingdom broke apart after its defeat by the Portuguese at Mbwila in 1665. Rival claimants fought for four decades, Sao Salvador stood abandoned, and the country was raided for captives throughout. Into that ruin, in 1704, came a young noblewoman of about twenty, baptised Beatriz and known as Kimpa Vita, who fell ill, appeared to die, and announced on recovering that Saint Anthony had entered her and now spoke through her.
Her preaching was direct. The saints and Christ himself, she said, had been born in Kongo, at Sao Salvador; the country's misery came from its divisions; the ruined capital must be reoccupied and the kingdom made one. Thousands followed her there, and she sent out women preachers of her own. John Thornton's reconstruction from the Capuchin records shows a movement that was neither a rejection of Catholicism nor a simple return to older religion, but an argument that the church belonged to Kongo as much as to Rome.
She was arrested by one of the claimants, tried by Capuchin missionaries as a heretic, and burned in 1706 with her infant son. Sao Salvador was reoccupied shortly afterwards, largely as she had urged. The kingdom survived in reduced form until Portugal abolished it in 1914, and the memory of a Kongolese prophet condemned by foreign clergy runs on into the twentieth century, most visibly in the movement founded by Simon Kimbangu in 1921.