This talk will argue that both opponents and advocates of Morisco expulsion employed debate about the Morisco period’s endgame to counter a pervasive narrative of imperial decline and to stake their respective claims on contemporary public affairs. The two different archives of arguments and episodes that emerged from this early seventeenth-century debate offered distinct models of regional exemplarity, scriptural exegesis, and textual production. In this way, the apparently chauvinistic struggle over how to eliminate Islam from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon became an engine of scholarly innovation.