In 1605, Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha in Madrid, Spain, introducing the most celebrated windmill scene in world literature: the deluded knight Don Quixote charges a row of windmills on the plains of La Mancha, believing them to be giants, only to be hurled from his horse when the sails strike him. The novel, now regarded as the first modern European novel, uses this comic episode to explore the collision between idealism and material reality, fiction and fact, heroism and folly. The windmills of La Mancha — still visible today — became one of literature's most enduring visual symbols.

The windmill combat scene gave rise to the universal phrase 'tilting at windmills,' meaning the pursuit of imaginary enemies or misguided ideals, which entered the literary vocabulary of virtually every European language. The scene influenced Romantic writers including Byron, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Kafka, all of whom acknowledged Cervantes' novel as a founding text of modern fiction. The windmill as an emblem of misrecognised reality — the mundane mistaken for the marvellous — became a recurring figure in post-Romantic poetry and prose.