Lotharingia

Goodness yes. The introduction to Lotharingia (haven't started that one yet, of course) is insanely compelling: "In AD 843, the three surviving grandsons of the great Emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited what became France, another Germany and the third Lotharingia, the chunk that initially divided the other two chunks: ‘the lands of Lothar’. The dynamic between these three great zones has dictated much of our subsequent fate." I'm Australian, though lived in the UK for a while, so I appreciate that most of the (rest of the) world has a complex, varied, mostly ugly and impenetrably complicated history that can, if you have a lifetime to consider things, explain why any particular thing is the way that it is ... but similar to your position, it's breathtaking trying to comprehend all the moving pieces over the past couple of thousand years. Stephen Clarke is now on my e-stack of books to read, thank you.