The citole is the medieval guitar, known only from pictures in manuscripts and statues on churches. It looks like a medium size guitar, hold horizontally and usually played with a long plectrum. It seems made from one carved block of wood, hollowed out and with a thin wooden front. The body is much thicker near the neck than at the bottom side. Some ancient pictures suggest that there was a very thick neck, with a hole in it for the thumb. Usually there is a raised fingerboard with frets. It probably had gut strings, but maybe wire ones.

For lots of information about the citole see the (very large!) page of Citoleproject, and Citole.

Only one highly decorated example has survived (in the British Museum, under the wrong name gittern), but that one has been converted into a violin, some centuries ago.

Left the examples we used to design the citole. Even a cardboard model was made to decide the size of the thumbhole. The 3 leaves are made like tuning pegs and can be taken out, to avoid damage during transport. The cat that modeled for the carving was called Joopy [U.P.] and so is now the nick-name of the instrument.

The cittern was popular as a folk instrument in western Europe in the 16th and 17th century. Compared with the lute and guitar, hardly any solo music was printed for it - mainly because it was most often used for strumming to accompany singing. However it was also part of the so called "Broken Consort" (a small house band - which contained a lute, an bandora, a violin, and a flute - which was quite popular in England), but even here it was mainly playing chords.

The cittern is very likely the descendent of the citole : you can still recognize the small "wings", the tapering body and the sickle-shape peghead. The neck is P-shaped: one side is rounded, the other (the thumb-side) is flat. It has a fretboard with metal frets. The tuning head ends in a scroll, or often a carving of a human head.

It has metal strings in 4 courses, some even with 3 strings. Tuning would be :
bb g'g'g d'd' e'e' , or in french tuning : a'a' g'g'g d'd' e'e' .
The sound is very rich and singing, like on most wire instruments. The little solo music that is found for it, is of high quality. See for much more information about the cittern : Theaterofmusic and Cetra.

Some cittern did not have frets under all strings (half frets). This was because the instrument was in so-called "mean tuning", so some notes would be too far out of tune to play in proper harmony. The only other instrument with this feature of half frets is the kabosi from Madagascar (see Africa).

In England the cittern survived for a long time, and developed during the 18th Century into the more robust, almost mandolin-like English guitar (sometimes called English guitar or cittern or cetra, or just guittar).

It has a flat or slightly rounded back. It often had an inlayed carved rosette made of brass and/or wood. A special capodastre could be screwed in the front of the fingerboard.

This was a wire-strung instrument, as opposed to the Spanish guitar, which had gut strings. It had 6 courses: 4 double and the 2 lowest ones single. The tuning was easy : open C tuning - c e gg c'c' e'e' g'g'.

A famous maker was Preston in London; many of his instruments survived till today. Often the tuning head was not with friction pegs (like the example) but with a metal tuning device with sliding parts, that could be moved with a key. A quite similar device is still used on Portuguese instruments.

This instrument has relatives like the German waldzither (see under) , the Swiss halszither (see under) and the wellknown Guitarra Portuguese (see Europe).

For some more information about this instrument and its music, see Cetra.

The waldzither was popular in Germany in the first half of the 20th century. It is a relative of the English guitar, but has only 5 courses, missing the 2nd lowest course. The metal strings are double, and tuned cc gg c'c' e'e' g'g' (open C-tuning).

The tuninghead looks much like the guitar-lutes from the same period (and from the same area). Sometimes they look more like an English guitar, or the later Guitarra Portuguese, and may be called Hamburger waldzither or Thüringer waldzither.

Many instruments were later used in the mandolin-orchestras as mandola, as they resemble a slightly bigger size flat mandolin.

For more information about the waldzither and its relatives, see Waldzither.de (in German). For more information about the guitar-like halszither in Switserland, see Halszither (in German).

bell cittern

The bell cittern derives its name from the distinctive outline of its body. It was first made in the 17th C. in Germany, and was known in England as the Bell Guittern. It was also popular in Scandinavia.

The bell cittern has the tapered sides of the older citterns.

It could be six double metal string courses, apparently tuned in unison, and in a normal guitar-tuning, but an octave higher.

The modern "Irish" cittern seems to have evolved from the Greek bouzouki and isn't directly related to the ancient instrument.

<< There's a lot of confusion about what names to use for all those large mandolins used in Irish music. Generally "octave mandolin" is simply a different name for the tenor mandola with a relatively short neck and four double strings tuned in fifths. But the names cittern and bouzouki are both used for a bewildering variety of eight- and ten-stringed (and occasionally 12-stringed) instruments tuned in different ways and (usually) with a longer neck than the octave mandolin. The question which is which is a source of endless discussions. >>

The text above is from Mandolin-player.com, where you can find much more information about mandolins and cittern-like instruments.
Another source for if you want to know more about all the differences in cittern/bouzoukis in folk music, is the website of Hobgoblin.