Two Weeks in Summer Soldiers and Others in Occupied Hesse-Kassel, 14–28 July 1625 Lucian Staiano-Daniels Yavetz School of Historical Studies, Foreign Policy, Tel Aviv, Israel Abstract The occupation of Hesse-Kassel during the Thirty Years War has been discussed by historians like John Thiebault. This paper revisits this topic with an analysis of letters exchanged between ordin- ary Hessian civilians and common cavalrymen in the Liga army in July 1625. While this occupation was indeed a crisis, the relationships between these soldiers and other people were also ambiva- lent and contingent, including kinship. Since these relationships were inextricably enmeshed in the interactions between early-modern armies and their surroundings, this article discusses war and the environment. These letters help reveal early-modern military operations on the smallest scale. Keywords early modern, German history, social history, environmental history, Thirty Years War, economic history The almost impossible quest to understand the intimate space that the human being puts between himself and his sense of self is the real work of the historian and, occasionally, when faced with this blank space which has to be unearthed and rediscovered, there is a strong temptation to let the documents from the…archives speak for themselves. Quite often they are so superb that one would like to give them to the reader as they are, without changing a single word; this is as much for their aesthetic value as for the depth of their significance. –Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives 1 Corresponding author: Lucian Staiano-Daniels, Yavetz School of Historical Studies, Foreign Policy, Gilman building, floor #3, room #380, Tel Aviv, 69978, Israel. Email: luciasdan@gmail.com 1 Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power, and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 49. Original Article War in History 1–25 © The Author(s) 2022 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/09683445221098170 journals.sagepub.com/home/wih