On May 28, the guns were silenced, and the troops were given a rest in preparation for the final assault. Inside the city, the besieged inhabitants, knowing that no relief was coming and that they were no longer capable of resisting another determined battery and push, held a holy procession through the city, a procession which ended at the Great Church. There, they all set aside their own sectarian differences and held the liturgy one final time.

In the early morning hours of the 29th, the Ottoman guns sounded, the armies breached the walls, and Emperor Constantine XI died with his men. By the afternoon, the city had fallen, and the citizens of Constantinople endured three solid days of looting, rape, enslavement, and pillaging as the city was desecrated. In the aftermath, Mehmet II The Great turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque, destroying or covering over the nearly 1,000 years of frescos and mosaics that adorned the great cathedral. It would remain a mosque until Ataturk turned it into a museum, which it remains to this day (though it should be noted that the accursed Erdogan has recently threatened to turn it back into an active mosque).