European lute

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The instrument that resulted when the oud was taken up by Christian Europe, and the clearest single case of organological descent in this Journey. It keeps the oud's defining features — the ribbed bowl back, the pear outline, the bent-back pegbox, gut courses plucked with the fingers — and adds two European modifications: gut frets tied around the neck, which quantise the fingerboard into fixed semitones, and a repertoire written in tablature. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's account is explicit that the medieval European lute descends from the gut-strung Arabian oud and that the name is the Arabic al-ʿūd. Iconography is the dating evidence and it is patchy: instruments of oud type appear in Iberian carving and manuscript illumination from well before the thirteenth century, but the Western lute cannot be told apart from the Arab ʿūd in pictures until roughly then, and one of the first depictions that plainly shows the European instrument is a player at a chess game in the Libro de los juegos commissioned by Alfonso X and completed about 1283. The lute went on to become the central domestic instrument of Renaissance Europe, and the fretted, waisted instruments that displaced it — vihuela, Renaissance guitar and their successors — sit on the same line.