LIRA

plural Lire, the monetary unit of Italy, equal to 100 centesimi. The lira was introduced in Europe by Charlemagne, who based it on the pound (libra) of silver. No lira coins were struck during the Middle Ages, and the lira remained strictly a money of account. By the 16th century several of the Italian states actually struck lira coins, but they varied considerably in weight. One of the states that used the lira was the kingdom of Sardinia, and this monetary unit was adopted in all of Italy when it became unified under Sardinian leadership. In 1862 the lira, which up to then had been divided into 20 solidi, was redefined, and the decimal system was introduced. in music, a pear-shaped bowed instrument with three to five strings. Closely related to the medieval rebec and, like the rebec, a precursor of the medieval fiddle, the lira survives essentially unchanged in several Balkan folk instruments, among them the Bulgarian gadulka, the Aegean lira, and the Balkan Slavic gusla. Its tuning and range vary. The word lira, a misapplication of lyra, the ancient Greek lyre played with a plectrum, had appeared by the 9th century for the Byzantine form of the Arab rabab, the ancestor of all European bowed instruments. The Byzantine lira spread westward through Europe, where its precise evolution is unclear; writers in the 11th and 12th centuries often used the words fiddle and lira interchangeably. Unlike the rabab and rebec but like the medieval fiddle, the lira has rear tuning pegs set in a flat peg disk. The lira, or lira da braccio, an Italian predecessor of the violin, was a 15th-century fiddle with three to five melody strings plus two off-the-fingerboard drone strings. Its bass version was the lira da gamba, or lirone.