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Martin de Azpilcueta (Navarrus), 1493-1586.
Martin de Azpilgueta (also known as "Doctor Navarrus") was a Spanish Dominican priest and leading legal scholar of the Salamanca School.
He studied at Cahors and Toulouse (although Navarrus left before Jean Bodin arrived there). Navarrus was appointed as professor of civil and canon law at the university of Salamanca. From 1538, he taught at Coimbra and became a personal counsellor to the King of Portugal.
Navarrus principal economic work is his Comentario (1556) where Navarrus explicitly denounced price controls and defended money-changing and usury. Independently of his Toulouse schoolmate Jean Bodin, Navarrus is considered an independent discoverer of the Quantity Theory of Money . As he wrote, "Other things being equal in countries where there is a great scarcity of money, all other saleable goods, and even the hands and labor of men, are given for less money than where it is abundant." Navarrus extended this to a more general scarcity theory of value, arguing that "all merchandise becomes dearer when it is in strong demand and short supply".
Navarrus served on a papal commission assembled in 1568 that resulted in a famous bull by Pope Paul V, Cum Unas, characterizing personal annuities as usurius. However, Navarrus' subsequent "clarifications" of the bull took out much of its force, noting how it contained several loopholes that allowed redeemable forms of annuities (a point Toledo and the Jesuits ran with in 1571) However, Navarrus's principal effort was in justifying interest achieved by bills of exchange, a growing practice in Mediterranean commerce. Pope Pius V, in his 1571 bull In Eam, had condemned exchange banking as usurious, but Navarrus commentaries again opened up loopholes.
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