The Ottoman Sultans began styling themselves as the heirs to the Roman Empire after 1453 - the year they besieged and conquered the historic capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. At this time, both the Turkic Sultans and the Russian Czars of Muscovy claimed to be the successors of the Eastern Roman Empire - with their respective cities being dubbed “Third Rome[s]” - due to the former’s religious and dynastic connections to the Royal Palaiologos Dynasty and the latter’s de-facto rulership over the former Imperial domain. Not all of the western world had initially seen these Turkic conquerors as the legitimate heirs to Constantine’s Empire, since most Germans had their Holy Roman Emperor - with legitimacy granted by the Pope - to look up to, but eventually - as time passed and the Sultans expanded their realms and as the continental politics drifted in Europe, some did recognize the Ottomans as being a true Empire. By the time that we as English speakers began referring to the realm of the Turkic Sultans as an Empire was likely past the days of the Ottomans’ height, and by the time contemporary historians began calling them ‘Ottomans,’ the Romanovs and Habsburgs were casting their own shadow over the waning corpse of the Osmanoğlu dynasty.