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I really like the Holy Roman Empire with all its small territories across the European continent. I am especially interested in the modern era though, so let's say 1618 - 1806. But I am also really interested in the European revolutions in general, from the French to all the little ones in the 1830s, 1848 etc.
My relationship to history is a bit weird in general. I am a person who needs to understand a period of time very well, before I can dig into a period earlier. So I am kind of building my historical concept from today, year by year and epoch and epoch into the past. I just don't know enough to step into the middle ages yet.
Now that I am thinking about it, that's true for a lot of other fields... I had many problems with electrical engineering in university, because I couldn't fully grasp the concept of quantum physics before doing the experiments, and that really stressed me out lol
I get the desire to move backwards in time. That goes for me too, to a lesser extent than you though.
Another useful way that I think might help you is to just see what else is happening in the world in that time period. That helps you create an anchor just as knowing what cones after does.
That's so odd to me because of how much the previous periods influenced what came next. Like how much of the absolute monarchical power and economic imbalance and (relatively) free access to information caused the peasant classes to rise up in the French Revolution.
I'm not criticising or anything just seems to me to be topsy-turvy.
Let me try to explain... It is impossible to understand WW2 if you do not understand the Weimar Republic and WW1 for example. That's why I try to understand an epoch and as soon as I "run out of explanations" I go to the events that influenced it.
The other way would be to start at the "beginning of history" but that is clearly impossible to define.
Just looking at a single event somewhere between 1520 and 1530 however is an island without context, I fail to understand without knowing what was around.