No one should be surprised that I make use of style very much different from that of the Commentaries on Genesis, or the other little treatises; for it is proper and permissible to ornament a history with the crafted elegance of words; however, the mysteries of sacred eloquence should be treated not with poetic loquacity, but with ecclesiastical plainness. Therefore I ask you to accept this graciously, and to keep it as perpetual monument to your name. The seriousness of purpose and the apparent looseness of structure may perhaps be reconciled by considering that the literal level of events was a less urgent concern for Guibert than the significance of those events. In addition, he imagined himself not so much as a recorder of events, but as a competitor in a rhetorical agon, as the implied metaphor that he uses in describing his activity as writer, in hujus stadio operis excurrisse debueram, "racing in a stadium," implies. In fact, in the course of composing his explicitly corrective version of the First Crusade, Guibert participates in several contests simultaneously; he "mollifies" the style and corrects the substance of previous writers on the Crusades; he argues for some miracles and against others; he utilizes and attempts to transcend both the Graeco-Roman and the Judaeo part of the Judaeo-Christian past. As a rhetorical performance, in both prose and verse, the results are impressive, since the Gesta Dei per Francos simultaneously reflects historical reality, and provides some insight into the workings of the mind of gifted, early twelfth-century French cleric and aristocrat. Summary of the Gesta Dei per Francos Characteristically, Guibert opens the Gesta defensively, justifying his choice of a modern topic by insisting upon the exceptional nature of the Crusade, as well as the exceptional nature of the French. The entire first book is devoted to a selective history of the Eastern Church and a denunciation of heresies, concluding with an extensive invective against Mahomet, compounding sex, excrement, and disease. [37] Guibert then moves forward in time, to the generation before the First Crusade, to describe a complaint about Muslim lust made by the Greek Emperor to the elder Count Robert of Flanders. Guibert also complains about the Greek Emperor's own excessive interest in erotic motivation for warriors.