On June 28, 1914, with a gunshot in Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, fell into a pool of blood. This incident became the fuse that ignited World War I.
June 28 was the day Serbia and Bosnia's allied forces had been defeated by Turkish troops in 1389, Serbia's day of national humiliation. The Austro-Hungarian Empire's choice to hold military exercises on that day was deliberately provocative.
Faced with such provocation, if they still chose to swallow their anger, what hope would that nation have left?
Archduke Franz Ferdinand personally reviewed the exercises. After they ended, as he returned to Sarajevo, he was shot dead by the Serbian youth Princip.
Likewise, on May 13, 1981, had Pope John Paul II been assassinated, it might very well have led to an all-out war between the Christian alliance and Muslims.
A new Crusades led by the Pope had narrowly missed humanity, all because the old man lying in that bed chose to forgive the assassin who had tried to kill him.
That bullet had missed by only a few millimeters, yet human history had been rewritten because of it—just like the arrow that struck Commander Abd al-Rahman during the Battle of Poitiers. If it had gone even slightly astray, the outcome of the Battle of Poitiers would have been unknown.
Without the merit of resisting the infidels, Charles Martel would not have established authority surpassing that of the Merovingian kings while serving as Mayor of the Palace, nor would he have developed ambitions to replace them. Then there would have been no three generations of his family creating the doctrine of the divine right of kings in order to seize the power to wear the legitimate coronation crown.
History's turning points were often trivial little matters. It was simply