A male name. the name, in medieval legend, of one of the wise men who came to Bethlehem to greet the birth of Christ. As early as the 2nd C it was believed that they were three in number and were kings, and by the 11th C the names Balthasar, Caspar (see Jasper) and Melchior had been attached to them. In 1164 Rainald of Dassel, Archbishop Designate of Cologne, brought their supposed relics from Milan to Cologne, which thenceforward became a great place of pilgrimage and the centre of a widely diffused cult. Baldassare became a fairly common name in Italy, but Balthasar has rarely been used in England; Shakespeare gives it to a servant in Much Ado about Nothing and it is sometimes found in the 17th C. No etymology can be offered.

M. Now rare in the British Empire, and in Britain never so common as in Italy and the Slavonic countries. Proposed origins are four: Chaldean Belteshazzar (‘Bel’s prince’); Persian Beltshazzar (‘prince of splendour’ or ‘war-council’); Slavonic Beli-tzar (‘white prince’); or ‘a fancy name invented at a period when bad Latin and rude Teutonic were being mixed up to make modern languages, and the Lingua Franca of the East was ringing in the ears of pilgrims’, Yonge.

Assyrian (masculine) - Bel has formed a prophet.