A NOTE ON INSTRUMENTS
Even if the rich thirteenth and fourteenth-century cantiga manuscripts contained no actual music, they
would still be prize documents for music history on account of the dozens of colored miniatures that
decorate them. These little paintings are so detailed and precisely drawn that they are believed in some
cases to be portraits of actual people. They show courtiers and minstrels of every stripe—Spanish,
Moorish, Jewish, male and female—all rubbing shoulders at Alfonso’s Toledo court and playing an
encyclopedic assortment of instruments (more than forty, from the ubiquitous minstrel’s fiddle to Moorish
exotica, encompassing zithers, bladder pipes, castanets, and hurdy-gurdies).