Yeah, ASoIaF is less "how Middle Ages really were" and more "how Left thinks Middle Ages were". FFS, Martin took Maesters out of the Faith of the Seven, which means that Church in Westeros contributes nothing to advancement of the society - despite historical Church actually being rather active in both preservation of past knowledge and also supporting scientists who were creating new knowledge.
It's even more hilariously inaccurate when you consider that not only was the Church responsible for preserving knowledge, but also the organization that oversaw the establishment of the universities. Rulers copied Bologna and Paris but those were founded by the Church and adhered to Church rules.
How much of actual history did GRRM read? Supposedly this was all based on the War of The Roses
He based his stuff on the popular history. Which basically means:
[H]as he read history? Yes, definitely. Has he read serious history? None at all. Has he understood history? Not at all. It is all just a Potemkin's village, but it flies because most people don't know much or anything about history, and so can't catch him in his BS.
Yeah I wrote a rather scathing post on this a while back either here or another ASOIAF thread basically ripping him for it. He thinks he understands it (like with the "corrupt church" stuff about the Faith of the Seven and the closet atheism), but is too dumb to realize that it's actually a mix of 19th-21st century bias that he uses to base his ideas rather than reality.
Say, know any serious history books or youtube channels I can read that are NOT abridged versions of history?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: There's a reason that people who study history from introductory undergraduate courses to doctoral dissertations focus on specific periods or subjects in history rather than overall. We have ten thousand years of the stuff, and there is no single historian who is an expert in the whole gamut.
If you want to know more, find a bit of history (say, oh, the Normandy landings) and search for books just on that. Maybe something else catches your interest and you jump to another part. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It's weird... stereotypically people hate history, but if you look at it as one fascinating tale (albeit one where you have to remember that things like "the arc of history" do not actually exist) it's actually quite fascinating.
History has the odd quality that it does not change with time.
In many instances you can get a far more conclusive idea from an ancient history, f'rex Josephus writing on Roman-Era Judea, than you possibly can from a modern scholar writing on the same thing because Josephus was actually there, watching things unfold and able to interview direct witnesses of historic events he detailed.
That's not entirely true. We're always looking to see if we mistranslated stuff or we find out that an author (such as Josephus) was heavily biased and actually a propagandist for the Romans. That's *another* thing to remember: You have to consider the author's bias. "History is written by the winners" is a maxim for very good reason.
Man, I really want to read a story, where any given nation in its medival state is placed between Westeros and Essos as an island.
See how the british islands, france, or Prussian Germany would deal with the clusterfuck that are Westeros and Essos.
I don't know about those three but I saw one where 11th century Byzantium wound up near them. Only a couple of chapters though.
Many years back there was an April Fool's Day edition of the ASOIAF mod for CK2 where they added "the eastern continent" (this was before Essos much less Sothoryos and Ulthos were part of the game) and it turned out to be medieval Europe to the east. The latest starting point was when Ned and his siblings were kids, and it wound up where Ned converted to the Wildling faith and led a war against his brother, Lyanna married Edward the Black Prince and converted to Catholicism, and fuck if I remember anything else besides Westeros basically collapsing into anarchy.
I don't know if the *exact* same thing would happen here, but it would throw so many things out of whack. Westeros is too big to actually be conquered but I can see mass conversions to actual Catholicism and general uprisings (the Faith of the Seven is screwed because while they're a total scam the Catholic Church certainly *is not*, they're in a technological stasis, have hilariously inefficient taxation and crippling corruption, and the Church might use it as an excuse to launch crusades against the "heathens" of Westeros (and Essos if it were to also come back).
The Free Cities except maybe Braavos are hosed because they're all heathens as well and have absurd slave-to-freeborn ratios (realistically slaves made 35% tops of a population; the only times it reached 90% were periods in the Caribbean but even that was largely due to slaves constantly dying due to the heat).
Short form they're fucked, long term you'll have additional shockwaves like the concept of universities and maesters losing their grips as people realize just how little knowledge those goofballs actually have, etc.