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 15 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 [Sidenote: Rienzi in exile.] 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 of the Fraticelli gave the king a pretext for committing Rienzi to the Archbishop of Prague for correction and instruction. The archbishop communicated with the Pope, and on the demand of Clement VI. Charles agreed to hand Rienzi over to the papal court on condition that his life should be spared. In 1352 Rienzi was conveyed to Avignon and thrust into prison. He owed his life perhaps less to the king’s request than to the opportune death of Clement VI. in this year.