Jesuits, who, for over a century, had protected the Guarani from enslavement through a network of Reductions, as depicted in The Mission. The Portuguese colonizers secured the expulsion of the Jesuits. On 1 April 1758, Pombal persuaded the aged Pope Benedict XIV to appoint the Portuguese Cardinal Saldanha to investigate allegations against the Jesuits. Benedict was skeptical about the gravity of the alleged abuses. He ordered a "minute inquiry", but to safeguard the Society's reputation, all serious matters were to be referred back to him. Benedict died the following month, on May 3. On May 15, Saldanha, having received the papal brief only a fortnight before, declared that the Jesuits were guilty of having exercised "illicit, public, and scandalous commerce" in Portugal and its colonies. He had not visited Jesuit houses as ordered and pronounced on the issues the pope had reserved for himself. Pombal implicated the Jesuits in the Távora affair, an attempted assassination of the king on 3 September 1758, on the grounds of their friendship with some of the supposed conspirators. On 19 January 1759, he issued a decree sequestering the property of the Society in the Portuguese dominions. The following September, he deported the Portuguese fathers, about one thousand in number, to the Pontifical States, keeping the foreigners in prison. Among those arrested and executed was the then denounced Gabriel Malagrida, the Jesuit confessor of Leonor of Távora, for "crimes against the faith". After Malagrida's execution in 1759, the Portuguese crown suppressed the Society. The Portuguese ambassador was recalled from Rome, and the papal nuncio was expelled. Diplomatic relations between Portugal and Rome were broken off until 1770. Suppression in France in 1764 The suppression of the Jesuits in France began in the French island colony of Martinique, where the Society of Jesus had a commercial stake in sugar plantations worked by enslaved Black persons and free labor. Their large mission plantations included large local populations that worked under the usual conditions of tropical colonial agriculture of the 18th century. The Catholic Encyclopedia in 1908 said that the practice of the missionaries occupying themselves personally in selling off the goods produced (an anomaly for a religious order) "was allowed partly to provide for the current expenses of the mission, partly to protect the simple, childlike natives from the common plague of dishonest intermediaries." Father Antoine La Vallette, Superior of the Martinique missions, borrowed money to expand