A formal appeal to Boniface was followed by a personal visit to the papal court. Received at first with jeers, his obstinacy provoked repression. As a relapsed, he might have been burned, but he was only imprisoned and forced to a second recantation, in spite of which Philippe le Bel, at the assembty of the Louvre in 1303, in his charges of heresy against Boniface asserted that the pope had approved a book of Arnaldo's which had already been burned by himself and by the University of Paris. Boniface, in fact, in releasing him, imposed on him silence on theologic matters, though appreciating his medical skill and appointing him papal physician. For a while he kept his peace, but a call from heaven forced him to renewed activity, and he solemnly warned Boniface of the divine vengeance if he remained insensible to the duty of averting the wrath to come by a thorough reformation of the Church. The catastrophe of Anagni soon followed, and Arnaldo, who had left the papal court, naturally regarded it as a confirmation of his prophecy, and looked upon himself as an envoy of God. With a fierce denunciation of clerical corruptions he repeated the warning to Benedict XI., who responded by imposing a penance on him and seizing all his apocalyptic tracts. In about a month Benedict, too, was dead, and Arnaldo announced that a third message would be sent to his successor, "though when and by whom has not been revealed to me, but I know that if he heeds it divine power will adorn him with its sublimest gifts; if he rejects it, God will visit him with a judgment so terrible that it will be a wonder to all the earth."[58]
For some years we know nothing of his movements, although his fertile pen was busily employed with little intermission, and the Church vainly endeavored to suppress his writings. In 1305 Fray Guillermo, Inquisitor of Valencia, excommunicated and ejected from church Gambaldo de Pilis, a servant of King Jayme, for possessing and circulating them. The king applied to Guillermo for his reasons, and, on being refused, angrily wrote to Eymerich, the Dominican general. He declared that Arnaldo's writings were eagerly read by himself, his queen and his children, by archbishops and bishops, by the clergy and the laity. He demanded that the sentence be revoked as uncanonical, else he would punish Fray Guillermo severely and visit with his displeasure all the Dominicans of his dominions. It was probably this royal favor which saved Arnaldo when he came near being burned at Santa Christina, and escaped with no worse infliction than being stigmatized as a necromancer and enchanter, a heretic and a pope of the heretics.[59]