Or, what to do in Europe before it becomes directly affected by my main POD...
Well, this is for my Empires of the East timeline, in which I have Genghis Khan dying in 1214. Now this doesn't have too much of an effect on Europe until 1237, when the lack of the Mongol invasions of Eastern Europe start to really change things. But I don't want Europe to be stuck in some sort of butterfly net, with everything still happening exactly the same as OTL. On the other hand, I don't want to throw in major PODs into Europe, either. What I want is a butterfly drift. By this I mean that things remain pretty recognizable for at least a few decades, but at the same time, the events in Europe slowly diverge from their OTL versions, by virtue of simply being in another universe. Births, deaths, marriages... as the years pass, things become more and more different from OTL.
So, any ideas of some minor things I can play around with in this time period, that will have effects that slowly increase in magnitude?