The Time Patrol In History

Even before the revelation right at the end of Poul Anderson's The Shield Of Time, there is considerable evidence that the Time Patrol has much more to do than just to counteract the activities of time criminals. At the Academy, recruits are told that sometimes they will be asked to help time travellers who have got into difficulties. What kind of difficulties? An expedition from the far future visits Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt in search of cultural inspiration and somehow gets lost so an Unattached agent of the Patrol from their era has to travel then to try to track them down.

Patrol intervention is necessary to:

prevent Cyrus the Great from being murdered in infancy;

prevent the Chinese from conquering North America before Columbus;

ensure that Odin acts as recounted in the Volsungasaga;

prevent a goddess religion from taking over in Northern Europe before Christianity arrives;

ensure that the first emigrants from Siberia do not settle in Beringia but proceed south into the Americas;

cause the Templar fleet to escape when the order is suppressed.

That is a lot of history that would have been different without the Patrol and also without any time criminals being involved.