Modern scholars debate its exact history, but it is generally accepted that it is descended from the medieval citole (or cytole).

Played by people of all social classes, the cittern was a popular instrument of casual music-making much like the guitar is today.

[3] The top of the pegbox was often decorated with a small carved head, perhaps not always of great artistic merit; in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, the term "cittern-head" is used as an insult:[4][5] Just as the lute was enlarged and bass-extended to become the theorbo and chitarrone for continuo work, so the cittern was developed into the ceterone, with its extended neck and unstopped bass strings, though this was a much less common instrument.

The instrument maker Johann Wilhelm Bindernagel (around 1770-1845), who worked in Gotha, made a mixed guitar-cittern under the name "Sister" or "German Guitar", which was equipped with seven gut strings.

The leading 18th-century Swedish songwriter Carl Michael Bellman played mostly on the cittern, and is shown with the instrument (now in the National Museum, Stockholm) in a 1779 portrait by Per Krafft the elder.