Emergent warriors and political leaders commonly held land as the core of symbolic identification with their ancestral people and places. Such identification meant pure ownership rather than the ‘holding right’ that rural people were given by legal instruments that the state generated. The fighters protected communal ownership once they achieved social approval for their competence to do so. Seeing land as their metaphor for ‘country’ and its borders, they engaged in national defence on their own initiative, or under rebels or monarchs. Counter to this perspective was the theoretical ownership of all land by the ‘king of kings’. The most senior titleholder among the chewa, the monarch, used land as an award to meritorious loyal warriors, for maderya, payments for military services rendered, or as gult in lieu of salary for administrators. Rights to gult lands reverted to the crown on death, and the maderya could be confirmed to family members if they volunteered to continue to serve as soldiers. In both regards, land for the monarchs was their tool for centralizing state power and legitimacy.

Land use, also an all-important political and economic base for the chewa, divided society perceptually into professional soldiers, clergy and private farmers (some of whom worked on their own lands and others on state lands). Women and members of occupational minorities were not awarded grants of lands reserved for military service, and other land grants occasionally made to them did not entail military titles and honours. A rare exception of women holding titles and even appointments to administrative posts occurred in the reign of Emperor Zera Yaqob (r.1434–68), who appointed his two sisters to provincial governorates (but later hanged them for disobeying his orders to stop participating in a spirit worship cult). In the seventeenth century, Emperor Serse Dingil granted land and certain jurisdictions to some women. Others of high rank received the new title of weyzero, the local version of the Turkish vizier, and though the duties it entailed at the time are difficult to establish, powerful men in the nineteenth century claimed the crown on the basis of being descendants of the weyzero. Any titles or status women received, however, did not generally modify their access to land grants until government reforms specified land ownership as usufruct rights that could be inherited; but this was only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.