been willing enough to stand by and watch the
destruction of the baronage. But the growing independence and the
arrogant pretensions of the Tribune exasperated the Pope. A new legate
was despatched to Italy to denounce and excommunicate Rienzi as a
heretic. The latter had no longer any support to lean upon. When a new
attack was threatened, the people sullenly refused to obey the call to
arms. Rienzi had not sufficient courage to risk a final struggle. On
December 15th he abdicated and retired in disguise from Rome. His rise
to power, his dazzling triumph, and his downfall were all comprised
within the brief period of seven months.

For the next few years Rienzi disappeared from view. According to his
own account he was concealed in a cave in the Apennines, where he
associated with some of the wilder members of the sect of the Fraticelli
and probably imbibed some of their tenets. Rome relapsed into anarchy,
and men's minds were distracted from politics by the ravages of the
black death. The great jubilee held in Rome in 1350 became a kind of
thanksgiving service of those whom the plague had spared.

It is said that Rienzi himself visited the scene of his exploits without
detection among the crowds of pilgrims. But he was destined to reappear
in a more public and disastrous manner. In his solitude his courage and
his ambition revived, and he meditated new plans for restoring freedom
to Rome and to Italy. The allegiance to the Church, which he had
professed in 1347, was weakened by the conduct of Clement VI and by the
influence of the Fraticelli, and he resolved in the future to ally
himself with the secular rather than with the ecclesiastical power, with
the Empire rather than with the papacy. In August, 1351, he appeared in
disguise in Prague and demanded an audience of Charles IV. To him he
proposed the far-reaching scheme which he had formed during his exile.

The Pope and the whole body of clergy were to be deprived of their
temporal power; the petty tyrants of Italy were to be driven out; and
the Emperor was to fix his residence in Rome as the supreme ruler of
Christendom. All this was to be accomplished by Rienzi himself at his
own cost and trouble. Charles IV listened with some curiosity to a man
whose career had excited such universal interest, but he was the last
man to be carried away by such chimerical suggestions.

The introduction into the political proposals of some of the religious
and communistic ideas