Niccolo Coscia

Niccolo Coscia sold offices, benefices and papal favours for eight years while the pope prayed, and was tried and imprisoned for it by the next one. He was a Beneventan priest who attached himself to the archbishop there, Vincenzo Maria Orsini, and rose with him; when Orsini was elected Benedict XIII in 1724 - a genuinely austere Dominican who wore a hair shirt, disliked ceremony and had no interest whatever in administration - Coscia came to Rome with him and was made a cardinal within months over the objections of essentially everyone. The pope handed him the government and did not look at it again. What followed was one of the more comprehensive lootings in the history of the curia: benefices sold, appointments auctioned, the grain supply manipulated, a concordat with Sardinia negotiated for a private consideration, and a network of fellow Beneventans installed throughout the administration. The pope defended him to the end, apparently believing the complaints were malice. Benedict XIII died in 1730 and the Roman crowd went looking for Coscia, who fled the city. Clement XII prosecuted him, and a tribunal fined him a hundred thousand ducats, deprived him of the right to vote in conclave and sentenced him to ten years in the Castel Sant'Angelo. He served most of it, was released, and was allowed to vote in the conclave of 1740 after all. He died in 1755 in Naples. Benedict XIII is otherwise remembered as a genuinely holy man, which is the point of the story: personal austerity at the top was no protection whatever against what was happening two rooms away. The trial records survive and are unusually detailed for a curial prosecution. He was buried in Naples without ceremony.

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