Sometime in the early renaissance - perhaps out of the family of fretted bowed string instruments which included the 'viola da gamba' or 'leg viola', but perhaps also out of unrelated fretless string instruments, emerged the unfretted violin family of instruments  and its alto member the 'viola da bracio' or 'arm viola'.

This name gave rise to the German term for the modern viola, the 'Bratsche', and its role of playing the middle ground against the violin gave rise to the French term 'Haute contre'. Out of the classical violin and viola soon evolved a range of louder instruments - some had sympathetic drone strings, some bowed drone strings, some had horns to amplify the sound. One variant ideally suited for outdoor dance music was the instrument known in English as the 'Transylvanian Viola', 'Three String viola' or 'Chord Viola'. This viola is set up with a flat, not curved, bridge, with three, not four, strings (tuned a, d' and g) and played with a strong, not delicate, bow (strung with hair of a stallion, less likely to have been made brittle by urine than the hair on a mare's tail). This set up enables the player to bow in a strong rhythmic manner all three strings simultaneously and, by double and triple stopping, to play quite loud chords.

The viola is still set up and played in this way in traditional music in most of Central Europe - especially Hungarian speaking regions - where, as an echo of the German and French terms given above, it is known either as the 'Bracsa' or 'Kontra'.