SMITHING:

Franciscan poverty posed a real threat to the Church. While most Franciscans preached peace, other groups of radical mendicant friars, such as the Northern Italian Dolcinian sect of the early 1300s, periodically led powerful and violent movements to overthrow the social order and destroy the Church as an institution of private property. The Church sent armies against them, and in 1307, the leader of the movement, Fra Dulcino, was captured and burned at the stake.

The Scottish Franciscan monk and Scholastic philosopher John Duns Scotus took a more nuanced view of pricing than Aquinas, proposing that prices came neither from balanced exchange nor from moral rules. Rather, he believed they came from a freely working secular market process. Private property was not the purview of the Church, which was ill equipped to understand all the market activities that went into creating value.

As Duns Scotus saw it, prices came from quantity and from the value of labor and expertise. To understand a price, one had to take into account "diligence, prudence, care, as well as the risk one accepts in doing such business." Therefore, it was very difficult for churchmen to calculate market prices.

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