During the period just following the expulsion of the Dutch the Portuguese government was not able to enforce its policy of commercial exclusivism. Treaties with Holland and England gave the citizens of those countries a right to trade with Brazil, and the colonists kept up their commerce with the Spanish possessions. Municipal charters were freely granted to Brazilian towns, and the existing franchises reformed according to the most liberal model in Portugal--that of Porto. Brazilians were relieved of the absurd feudal distinctions which exempted nobles alone from liability to torture, and regulated the clothes a man might wear. The extraordinary rapidity of Brazil's increase in population and territory during the middle of the seventeenth century was largely due to comparative freedom from vexatious restrictions and exactions--commercial and governmental. By the end of the century there were three-quarters of a million people in Brazil--a fivefold increase in seventy years, in spite of the fact that the most populous provinces had been the scene of war for twenty-four years of that time. But the Portuguese government lost little time in returning to the old restrictive conditions. Since the loss of the Indies, Brazil was Portugal's principal source of wealth, and aristocracy and Court made the most of the unhappy colony. Navigation companies were chartered and given a monopoly of all commerce--export and import. The Jesuits renewed their efforts to gain control of the Indians. In Sao Paulo they had no chance of success, but in the North the celebrated Padre Antonio Vieira, one of the greatest geniuses that Portugal has ever produced, was given a free hand. He nearly smothered the whites of Maranhao and Para with a ring of missions, and his successors established settlements on the Amazon which finally spread so as to communicate with the Spanish missions in Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay. The Brazilians of Maranhao and Para did not object to the occupation of the valley of the Amazon, but they bitterly resented the Jesuit encroachments in their own neighbourhood. In 1684 a rebellion finally broke out in Maranhao under the leadership of Manoel Beckman. He paid the forfeit with his life, but his work had warned the Portuguese authorities that they must not push their favours to the Jesuits too far.