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In the Christian tradition, poverty is associated not with deprivation but with sharing. As the Acts of
the Apostles recounts, the first converts “were together and had all things in common” (Acts
2:44–45; cf. 11:28–29). Likewise, following the naked Christ in nakedness did not imply rejecting
the value of material goods, but rather using them rightly by distributing one’s possessions to those
most in need. Although grounded in the same scriptural foundations, the religious orders of the
medieval West developed markedly different understandings of poverty. Within the monastic
tradition—which, between the sixth and ninth centuries, was shaped primarily by the Benedictine
Rule—poverty was not the central religious vow and was conceived chiefly as an individual
condition, since monasteries were permitted to own the property necessary for their subsistence. For
contemplative communities, labour was an essential dimension of religious life, generating the
resources that sustained both monastic communities and the wider societies that developed around
them. Poverty, therefore, was understood as a means of fostering communion rather than as a
condition of destitution.
From the beginning of the thirteenth century, however, the new Mendicant Orders spread rapidly
across Europe, encouraged by Pope Innocent III and his successors as a response to the expansion
of dualist heresies. They advanced a far more radical conception of voluntary poverty, embodied
above all in the example of Francis of Assisi. Poverty became a collective commitment and an
indispensable prerequisite for the authentic imitation of Christ. The mendicant fraternities placed
their trust primarily in Divine Providence, while labour assumed a secondary role. Drawing on a
selection of key texts, this article compares these two conceptions of poverty within the regular
religious orders. It also examines the different responses adopted by communal pauperistic
movements to the ideal of incerta mendicitas (uncertain or non-endowed mendicancy), showing
how the choice between absolute and relative poverty became a source of internal division and, at
times, of bitter conflict with the Apostolic See.