During the Cyprus War (1570-1573), the clash between the Venetians and the Ottomans for control of the island, an indispensable resource for both sides turned out to be one Solomon Nathan Ashkenazi. Born into a family of Jewish origin in Udine - and therefore a Venetian subject - Ashkenazi had studied medicine in Padua, graduating and practising first at the court of Sigismund II Augustus, King of Poland. We then find Ashkenazi around 1570 in Constantinople with the title of official physician to the Ottoman Grand Vizier, the celebrated Sokollu Mehmed Pasha. However, Ashkenazi was at the same time the official physician of Marcantonio Barbaro, a Venetian bailo stationed in Constantinople. When war broke out towards the end of 1570, Ashkenazi strove from the start to end the war in the most dignified manner for his former homeland; as Benjamin Arbel, an excellent scholar of Venetian Jewish history, has written, it is highly probable that Ashkenazi still harboured a sincere attachment to Venice, where he probably still had relatives. Attention to this element is crucial: the Venetian Senate had arranged for the expulsion of Venetian Jews and the confiscation of their property, as they were convinced that Joseph Nasi was behind the outbreak of war. Nasi would deserve a separate pill, but in essence he was a Sephardic Jewish merchant who had moved to Constantinople and had been expelled from Venice years earlier - he was the nephew of the very famous Dona Gracia Nasi. Nasi was blamed by the Venetians for the Arsenal fire in September 1569, thus reinforcing an increasingly anti-Semitic climate in the lagoon city. Ashkenazi therefore worked hard to end the war in the most dignified way for Venice, as he feared further reprisals against his co-religionists remaining in the city and his relatives. Ashkenazi's intervention proved particularly effective, as evidenced by Barbaro's letters to the Council of Ten now preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana - but these negotiations deserve another pill.