Inheritance of romans

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   The Byzantines always perceived themselves as the only people who had the ancestral  right to be called Romans.

On the other hand the western Europeans who also considered their
empire heir to the western Roman empire and themselves descendants of
the Romans of the west often quarelled with the Byzantines over these
matters.

This is the account of Liutprand of Cremona ambassador in Constantinople  of the Holy Roman Emperor of the west:

On this same day he ordered me to be his guest. Not; thinking me
worthy, however, to be placed above any of his nobles, I sat in the
fifteenth place from him, and without a tablecloth. Not only did no one
of my suite sit at table, but not one of them saw even the house in
which I was a guest. During which disgusting and foul meal, which was
washed down with oil after the "manner of drunkards, and moistened also
with a certain and other exceedingly bad fish liquor, he asked me many
questions concerning your power, many concerning your dominions and
your army. And when I had replied to him consequently and truly, "You
lie," he said, "the soldiers of your master do -not know bow to ride,
nor do they know how to fight on foot; the size of their shields, the
weight of their breast-plates, the length of their swords, and the
burden of their helms permits them to fight in neither one way nor the
other." Then he added, smiling: "their gluttony also impedes them, for
their God is their belly, their courage but wind, their bravery
drunkenness. Their fasting means dissolution, their sobriety panic. Nor
has your master a number of fleets on the sea. I alone have a force of
navigators; I will attack him with my ships, I will overrun his
maritime cities with war, and those which a-re near the rivers I will
reduce to ashes. And how, I ask, can he even on landresist we with his scanty forces? His son was there, his wife was
there, the Saxons, Swabians, Bavarians, were all with him: and if they
did not know enough and were unable to take one little city that
resisted them, how will they resist me when I come, I who am followed
by as many troops as

'Gargara corn-ears have, or grape-shoots the island of Lesbos,

Stars in the sky are found, or waves in the billowy ocean

When I wished to reply to him and to give forth an answer worthy of his
boasting, he did not permit me; but added as if to scoff at me: "You
are -not Romans but Lombards." When he wished to speak further and was
waving his hand to impose silence upon me, I said in anger: "History,
teaches that the fratricide Romulus, from whom also the Romans are
named, was born in adultery-; and that he made an asylum for himself in
which he received insolvent debtors, fugitive slaves, homicides, and
those who were worthy of death for their deeds. And he called to
himself a certain number of such and called them Romans. From such
nobility those are descended whom you call world-rulers, that is,
emperors; whom we, namely the Lombards, Saxons, Franks, Lotharingians,
Bavarians, Swabians, Burgundians, so despise, that when angry, we can
call our enemies nothing more scornful than Roman-comprehending in this
one thing, that is in the name of the Romans, whatever there is of
contemptibility, of timidity, of avarice, of luxury, of lying: in a
word, of viciousness. But because you do maintain that we are unwarlike
and ignorant of horsemanship, if the sins of the Christians shall merit
that you shall remain in this hard-heartedness: the next battle will
show what you are, and how warlike we."

http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/source/liudprand1.html