What Counts as a Medieval Keyboard Instrument?

Long before the piano, and even before the harpsichord as we'd recognise it, medieval musicians were already experimenting with keys. "Medieval" here means roughly before 1400–1450 — the centuries before the Renaissance — and the instruments from this era look nothing like the elegant spinets and harpsichords later in our catalogue. They're stranger, rarer, and in some cases barely understood at all.

The organistrum

The earliest true keyboard instrument on record is the organistrum, described in a 13th-century treatise as having eight tangents set at intervals based on Pythagorean principles. It was essentially a mechanised, keyed version of a hurdy-gurdy — often large enough to require two players, one to turn the crank and one to work the keys — and it's usually credited as the first appearance of the keyboard principle in Western music at all.

The portative and positive organ

Small portable organs — the portative, carried and played by one person, and the larger positive organ, set down and played stationary — were widespread in medieval churches and courts. These aren't stringed keyboard instruments in the harpsichord or piano sense, but they used a real keyboard to control airflow through pipes, making them a direct ancestor of the keyboard tradition as much as any stringed instrument.

The chekker — a mystery instrument

One of the strangest entries in keyboard history is the "chekker," first mentioned in a 1388 letter by King John of Aragon describing "an instrument seeming like organs, that sounds with strings." No example survives, and nobody today is entirely sure what it looked like or how its action worked — only that it was strung like a harpsichord or clavichord but resembled an organ in shape. It may be the closest thing we have to a missing link between organs and the first true stringed keyboards.

The clavicymbalum and clavicytherium — the harpsichord's ancestors

By the late 1300s, references appear to the clavicymbalum, an early keyboard instrument in which the keys plucked the strings of what was essentially a psaltery — a direct forerunner of the harpsichord. Its upright cousin, the clavicytherium, arranged the same plucking mechanism vertically to save space. The earliest surviving example of any stringed keyboard instrument in the world is a clavicytherium made around 1480, now held at the Royal College of Music in London — meaning everything else in the harpsichord and piano family that survives today is younger than that single instrument.

These two instruments sit right on the boundary between medieval and Renaissance, and it's from this lineage that the harpsichords, spinets, and virginals in collections like ours ultimately descend.

Where the story leads: our earliest catalogued instrument

One of the oldest instruments currently in our own catalogue is a 1523 polygonal spinet by Portaluppi, made in Italy and now held at the Musée de la Musique in Paris. It doesn't count as medieval itself — by 1523 the Renaissance was well underway — but it's a direct descendant of the clavicymbalum tradition described above: a plucked keyboard instrument built less than half a century after the earliest surviving clavicytherium.

Explore the collection

If the medieval and early Renaissance keyboard story interests you, browse our catalogue of over 1,250 historic keyboard instruments from around the world, including the earliest pieces we've been able to document.

Photo Credit: Janot Wikicommons