The citole was a string musical instrument, closely associated with the medieval fiddles (viol, vielle, gigue) and commonly used from 1200–1350.

[1][2][3] It was known by other names in various languages: cedra, cetera, cetola, cetula, cistola, citola, citula, citera, chytara, cistole, cithar, cuitole, cythera, cythol, cytiole, cytolys, gytolle, sitole, sytholle, sytole, and zitol.

One example cited by the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica: a specific reference to the citole may be found in Wycliffe's Bible (1360) in 2 Samuel vi.

[22] The neck was generally shorter than the body, and players' hands did not have to move far to reach all the frets.

Another documented feature was the back, which was neither curved in a bowl like a lute or gittern, nor flat like a modern guitar, but instead slanted "upwards from each side to a central ridge extended in the neck.

Due to its modifications, the Warwick citole is not necessarily representative, and X-ray analysis reveals that it originally had six end-mounted pegs.

Holly-leaf citoles had an outline shaped like a holly leaf, with as many as five corners (two on each side and one at the lower end).

The British Museum citole originally had pegs for six strings (the holes covered up when the instrument was converted to violin and revealed under X-Ray photography).

The Robert de Lisle Psalter citole (deep neck with thumbhole) is depicted with five frets.

Documents contemporary to the Middle Ages haven't been discovered which cite the citole by name when they talk about tuning.

[31] Professor Ephraim Segerman made a case that the entry in the document for a lute-like instrument labeled "cithara" applied to the citola.

One type looks like the soundholes on lutes, a circle cut from near the center of the soundboard in a large, elaborate circular carving called a rose.

[33] Instruments with holes cut into the sides include the Ducal Palace Studiolo cittern and the citole labeled "Plate 4 : Toro Collegiate : West Door, ca 1240" on Christian Rault's web page: The emergence of new approaches to plucked instruments, 13th - 15th centuries.

[21] Laurence Wright called the vielle and the citole "a symmetrical pair", saying that the two are not only frequently illustrated as playing together, but that they are also commonly listed together in literature.

Thinking about modern plucked and bowed instruments he speculated that the two complimented one another, saying the purpose of the citole in such music would be, "to help clarify the blurry articulation of the vielle with its sharp attack; tighten ensemble playing through its constant rhythmic subdivision; and secure the intonation of the bowed instrument with its droning and its frets."

[35] Based on the lack of widespread evidence, pictorially and linguistically, Wright felt that an Italian origin of the instrument was less likely.

[35] He felt Spain was a much more likely candidate to have invented the instrument because of the wide distribution of possible citole artwork.

[35] Wright also mentions that King Alfonso el Sabio, who had the Cantigas de Santa Maria written and illustrated, had two "citolers" in his court at the time.

[24] She points out that the term citole in the vernacular of different European languages ("Latin, Occitan, French, Castilian, Anglo-Norman and German") flourished in "the second half of the 13th century".

[24][36] Wright also wrote about the historical evidence for more ancient origins of the citole (and other European instruments, including fiddles).

As he saw it the two choices at the time (1984) were 1) Winternitz's theory that traced the citole back to the classical kithara, by adding a fingerboard, and 2) a relation to the fiddle or an "oriental necked instrument.

[38] An issue he took with the Beatus Manuscripts' depictions is that they are largely stylized and it is difficult to say conclusively that any of the instruments are citoles.

[38] Dr. Emanuel Winternitz talked about musical instruments evolving over time, in lecture and in the 1961 paper The Survival of the Kithara and the Evolution of the Cittern.

[40] Winternitz credited a Professor Westwood for making the Utrecht Psalter discoveries, quoting Westwood's 1859 paper, Archæological Notes of a Tour in Denmark, Prussia, and Holland: "...frequently shows the ancient kithara side by side with an instrument that has the body of a kithara but a neck in place of the yoke, in other words, a cittern, that is if we want to project this term as far back as the 9th century.

The frets are usually carefully indicated on the neck, the graceful curvature of the wings corresponds precisely to that of the arms of the kitharas nearby.

"[43] Musicologist Laurence Wright, who is credited with clearing up the differences between the gittern and the citole wasn't fully convinced about Winternitz's continuous transformation.

[40] In the entry he wrote for the citole in 1985 in The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, he said that the citole could only have been created from the plucked fiddles that were common in Europe at the time[40] (Other instruments related to these include the guitar fiddle, and the early vielle and viol).

Three points he made were that a continuous record of instruments with the vestigial wings on the upper corners did not exist for the preceding 200-year period before 1200 AD, that the Spanish instruments thought to be citoles did not have the vestigial wings, and that the name citole did not exist before the 12th century.

A theory of stringed instruments with fingerboards was explained in his 1999 paper, A Short History of the Cittern, where part of the paper explained the existence of short lute-like instruments in Central Asia, and mentioned their entry in Europe around the 8th century.

[40] Connecting back to Winternitz's continuous development theory, Segerman said that a good way to link an instrument in medieval art to the citole identity was to look for some sign that there was thinking about the cithara-lyre in the design.