The finances of the Papal States under…

August 1730 CE

The finances of the Papal States under Pope Benedict XIII had been delivered into the hands of Cardinal Niccolò Coscia and other members of the curia, who have drained the financial resources of the see.

The College of Cardinals, after deliberating for four months, selects Lorenzo Corsini, seventy-eight years old and with failing eyesight, who has held all the important offices of the Roman Curia.

Clement XII is one of the oldest men to be elected Pope.

As a Corsini, with his mother a Strozzi, the new pope represents a family in the highest level of Florentine society, with a cardinal in every generation for the previous hundred years.

Corsini had been a lawyer, with a degree from the University of Pisa, who had practiced law under the able direction of his uncle, Cardinal Neri Corsini.

After the death of his uncle and his father, in 1685, Lorenzo, now thirty-three, would have become head of the Corsini.

Instead he had resigned his right of primogeniture and from Pope Innocent XI (1676–89) he had purchased, according to the custom of the time, for thirty thousand scudi, a position of prelatial rank and devoted his wealth and leisure to the enlargement of the library bequeathed to him by his uncle.

Corsini had in 1696 been appointed treasurer-general and governor of the Castel Sant'Angelo.

His good fortune increased during the pontificate of Pope Clement XI (1700–21), who employed his talents as a courtier and on May 17, 1706, rewarded him with a cardinal's hat, retaining his services as papal treasurer.

He had advanced still further under Pope Benedict XIII, who had made him prefect of the judicial tribunal known as the Segnatura di Giustizia.

He was successively Cardinal-Priest of San Pietro in Vincoli and Cardinal-Bishop of Frascati.

Though he is blind and compelled to keep to his bed, from which he gives audiences and transacts affairs of state, he surrounds himself with capable officials, many of them his Corsini relatives, but he does little for his family except to purchase and enlarge the palace built in Trastevere for the Riarii, and now known as the Palazzo Corsini (the seat of the Regia Accademia dei Lincei).

His nephew, Cardinal Neri Corsini, will in 1754, found there the famous Corsini Library.

As Pope Clement XII, his first moves are to restore the papal finances.

He demands restitution from the ministers who had abused the confidence of his predecessor.

The chief culprit, Cardinal Coscia, is heavily fined and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment.

He gives permission in August 1730, for Duke Victor Amadeus II of Savoy to carry out a morganatic marriage to Anna Canalis di Cumiana.

Victor Amadeus II subsequently abdicates his throne causing great unrest in Savoy.

Competitions had become the rage during the Baroque age to design buildings, fountains, and even the Spanish Steps.

Pope Clement XII in 1730 organizes a contest in which Nicola Salvi initially loses to Alessandro Galilei—but due to the outcry in Rome over the fact that a Florentine had won, Salvi is awarded the commission anyway.