What are some popular medieval musical instruments?

Wind instruments included recorders; double reed pipes, such as the hornpipe and shawm; Bagpipes, which were of many types and played all over Europe; trumpets and horns, with the later often made of wood and having finger holes like recorders. These were popular instruments, but there were many others.

Stringed instruments included lutes, harps, fiddles, and, in some places, lyres. The lutes were not popular in Spain, where the local people associated them with Islamic music and replaced them with the vihuela de mano, the ancestors of Guitars. There were a number of different kinds of medieval fiddles, with some deriving their shape from the vihuela, and ancestral to the viola da gamba. The Byzantine fiddle, called a rebec, had a pear shaped body and was ancestral to the German geige, which gave its tuning to the violin. There were bowed lyres in Northern Europe.

The pipe organ, inherited from the Romans, who had a primitive form called a hydraulis, was an important instrument in the Byzantine Empire, and was reintroduced to the West about the time of Charlemagne. A very small pipe organ called a portative organ was used in processions.

Drums were used in various forms.