The Romans took it for a while
Do you mean the conquest of the 4th crusade? Those people weren't romans, arguably nobody was by the 13th century - perhaps if anyone, the locals had a better claim to it than the conquerors.
Do you mean the conquest of the 4th crusade? Those people weren't romans, arguably nobody was by the 13th century - perhaps if anyone, the locals had a better claim to it than the conquerors.
If you go by the criterion of (primary) self-identification there were Romans until the 1800s at least. By unbroken institutional continuity with the bureaucracy of Empire you can argue over whether it ended in 1453 or 1922.
> In a famous assessment of the name, the political philosopher Voltaire remarked sardonically: "This body which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_Empire
it sort of sounds like a synonym for Roman, it was one of the (curiously few!) conquests of Constantinople, etc. It just wasn't actually Roman anything.