As he was leaving his lodgings on the morning of the 3rd January 1889 Nietzsche saw a cabman beating his horse at the cab rank in the Piazza Carlo Alberto. With a cry he flung himself across the square and threw his arms about the animal's neck. Then he lost consciousness and slid to the ground, still clasping the tormented horse. A crowd gathered, and his landlord, attracted to the scene, recognized his lodger and had him carried back to his room. For a long time he lay unconscious. When he awoke he was no longer himself: at first he sang and shouted and thumped the piano, so that the landlord, who had already called a doctor, threatened to call a policeman too; then he quietened down, and began writing the famous series of epistles to the courts of Europe and to his friends announcing his arrival as Dionysus and the Crucified. How many he wrote is not known for certain. Those directed to public figures announced that he, ‘the Crucified’, would be going to Rome ‘on Tuesday’ (the 8th January), where the princes of Europe, together with the Pope, were to assemble: a notice to this effect went to the secretary of state of the Vatican. The Hohenzollerns, however, were to be excluded, and the other German princes were advised to have nothing to do with them: even now the Reich is still the enemy of German culture.

To Peter Gast went a single line:

To Brandes a slightly longer epistle:

Letters also went to (among others) Strindberg, Malwida, Bùlow, Spitteler and Rohde. Cosima received a single line: