Jacopo (or Giacomo) of Gaeta, who was also known as Hekim Yakub, was born around 1430 into a Jewish family in the Italian town of Gaeta and died in Istanbul in 1484. A convert to Islam, he was an influential Ottoman physician, diplomat, and court official during the reign of Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror. Where Yakub obtained his medical knowledge, when he settled in Istanbul, and the circumstances of his conversion to Islam are all uncertain. Historical sources suggest that he must have studied medicine inItaly, moving to the Ottoman Empire after Pope Nicholas V’s abolition of …