What literary genre is Don Quixote chiefly satirizing?

Don Quixote chiefly satirizes chivalric romances, the popular tales of knights-errant and heroic adventure.

Alonso Quijano reads these books so obsessively that he begins interpreting ordinary reality through their conventions. Inns become castles, windmills become giants, and everyday people are recast as figures in a romance narrative. Cervantes uses these misreadings to parody exaggerated quests, enchanted machinery, idealized damsels, and the rigid honor codes common to the genre.

The novel is not simply an attack on all medieval literature. It also experiments with storytelling, unreliable narration, invented authorship, and the relationship between fiction and reality. Part II deepens the joke because characters have read Part I and deliberately stage chivalric situations for Quixote. Thus the book satirizes both chivalric romance and the literary habits surrounding it, while also becoming a landmark in the development of the modern novel.