Europe's rise stemmed from increasing wealth in the Italian cities allowing for all that came afterwards. As long as the cities of Northern and Central Italy remain rich, and encouraged the studies of the humanities, then the base for Europe's rise is there. Now, it should be said that the Spanish discovery of New World Silver was massive in this period because it flooded both Europe and China with excess capital, often unrestrained in its growth in supply.
If you want to disturb Europe's rise, you need to destroy the development of large states in the 15th and 16th centuries by a reassertion of noble power against the state. But before that, you need to do something to destroy the wealth of Northern Italy. War alone did not accomplish this in time; it was full of war. You need, I think, the Mongols to hit Northern Italy. If so, and they do to it what they did to Abbasid Baghdad , then perhaps a disruption occurs.
Also, I have to say that perhaps the Black Death played a role. Hear me out:
Europe before the Black Death was essentially overpopulated and full of grinding poverty. States were becoming marginally more effective, but in general, the power of the nobility was strong, wages were infintesimal, famine routinely killed off sizable parts of the population.
After the Black Death, things were different. You had massive social mobility (just by default), rising wages because of a tight labor market, and increasingly powerful states because of the squeeze being put on the nobility. This laid the foundations for the development of a middle class and a rising bureaucracy. The lack of people meant that food became more readily available, and diets became more varied and included a lot more protein, leading to increasing rates of physical strength that increased labor productivity.