In what year did Constantinople fall to the Ottomans?

The story behind the answer

The city fell after a 53-day siege led by Sultan Mehmed II, whose massive gunpowder artillery finally cracked the famed Theodosian Walls. A final assault on May 29 ended the millennium-old Byzantine Empire; Emperor Constantine XI died fighting at the ramparts as Ottoman troops poured in.

The conquest reshaped Eurasian history: it tightened Ottoman control over key trade routes, encouraged Western Europeans to seek oceanic paths to Asia, and sped the flow of Greek scholarship to Italy, energizing the Renaissance. For context, 1204 was the Fourth Crusade’s sack of the city; 1452 saw Mehmed build Rumeli Hisarı to choke the Bosporus; and 1461 marks the fall of Trebizond, the last Byzantine holdout.