Niccolò Coscia
Catholic cardinal
Niccolò Coscia (1681 – 8 February 1755) was an Italian Latin Catholic cardinal.
He was born at Pietradefusi, near Avellino. In 1725, he was appointed as Cardinal of Santa Maria in Domnica by Pope Benedict XIII, whose secretary he had been when the future pope was Archbishop of Benevento.
Coscia held the effective government of the Papal States during Benedict's reign. He took advantage of his position to commit a long series of financial abuses, causing the ruin of the Papal treasury. According to Montesquieu, "All the money of Rome goes to Benevento... as the Beneventani direct [Benedict's] weakness".
When Benedict died, Coscia fled Rome. In 1731, he was tried, excommunicated and condemned to ten years' imprisonment in Castel Sant'Angelo. However, he managed to have his sentence commuted to a fine.
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This entry incorporates text from “Niccolò Coscia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.