As the saying goes: "those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it; those who do know history are condemned to watch everyone else repeat it".
But Europe's "local" medievally rooted history is always either useless or utterly malignant and has only been used to turn against each other people that could otherwise live in peace and prosperity, sometimes with violent consequences. Even the concept of "nations" is utter bulshit and should be erased from people's mental vocabulary imho. You just have groups of people with regional ties (because assets like land property rights can't unfortunately be easily transferred like you can with Bitcons ...yet :P) and economic interests and real cultural identities (that never, ever map in a useful way to "nations" or "provinces"... if they do map to anything it's at the bigger scales with race and religion, or at smaller scales with sub-culture groups, gender identities and these kinds of sutff).
The whole modern version of "understanding history" is a freakin cancer that can only bring confusion and false understanding.
If you seriously believe this, then I don't think you have much of a chance of understanding much of anything