Besides Italian or Italianate novellas, another very popular and influential form of imported fiction came from Spain and Portugal. These were chivalric romances, of which there were three major Iberian cycles in the sixteenth century. Amadis de Gaula had its first known Spanish edition in 1508, and was known in England by its French title of Amadis de Gaule. Palmerin first appeared in 1511, and the Mirror of Knighthood (Espejo de Principes y Cavalleros) had its inception somewhat later than the others, in 1562. Their scale was vast: the Amadis cycle ran through seven generations of one dynasty, from Amadis's father Perion to his great-great-great-grandson Rogel of Greece; while Palmerin had five volumes which covered five generations of the dynasty, from Palmerin d'Oliva's father Florendos to his great-great-grandson Flortir (Book iv) and his nephew's son Palmerin of England (Book v). This proliferation of sequels resulted in multiple authorship. Amadis was begun by Garcí Ordóñez (or Rodríguez) de Montalvo, but taken over by others. The authorship of the early books of Palmerin is obscure, while the four volumes of The Mirror of Knighthood had three different authors.

John J. O'Connor, in his detailed study of Amadis and its influence, asserts that ‘The romance of chivalry is a literary genre that was as close to the hearts of sixteenth-century readers as it is distant from ours.’ It is true that these romances appear alien to a modern sensibility if judged by the novelistic criteria of naturalism and of a narrative structure which has a clear beginning, middle and end.