How did they name themselves? How did others name them?

Interestingly enough, the Ottoman Empire continued to refer to non-Muslim subjects as "theRûm" ("the Romans") even after the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Apparently my Pontic Greek great-grandparents were considered Roman 400+ years after Constantinople fell, so the term stuck around a heck of a lot longer in the Eastern world than it did in the Western.

Indeed it officially persisted until the Balkan Wars in the 20th century. My grandfather was born in southern bulgaria, At the time that was 'Eastern Rumelia' and nominally Ottoman so he was a Rumelian or Roman and my mother heard the expression Rumelian in use by the peasants in the southern mountains meaning local non Turks and this was in the 1930's.

But then that leads in to the question of whether the Roman Empire ended in 1485 with the fall of Constantinople, 1923 with the end of the Ottoman Sultanate who took on the title if Roman Emperor in 1485 or still continues as the Roman Catholic church as the Pope is in direct line from the senior priest of the Roman Republic; the Pontifex Maximus.
 
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