In 1280 Abulafia went to Rome intending to obtain an audience with Pope Nicholas III and speak to him on behalf of the Jews. What exactly he meant to say is not certain and his own accounts are elliptical. The pope, informed that he was coming, is reported to have given orders that he be seized and burned on arrival. Abulafia went anyway. The pope died suddenly the night before he reached Soriano, and after a short detention he was released.
That is the pattern of his life: enormous confidence, prophetic and increasingly messianic claims about himself, and a talent for provoking authority. He wandered constantly, through Greece, Italy, Spain and Sicily, gathering students in each place, and in Sicily his claims drew the intervention of Solomon ibn Adret of Barcelona, the leading legal authority of the Spanish Jewish world, who denounced him in circular letters and put his teaching under ban. Abulafia's reply is one of the more spirited documents in medieval Jewish polemic and did not help him.
He disappears from the record around 1291. The ban kept his name out of respectable citation for centuries, but the manuscripts circulated regardless: the Safed Kabbalists read him, later Hasidic writing carries his techniques without the attribution, and the Christian Kabbalists of the Renaissance took him up with enthusiasm. Modern scholarship has restored him to the centre of the story, as the representative of a Kabbalah that is about experience rather than about theosophy.