Yet some Armenians of the Ottoman Empire were able to mitigate the formal restrictions on their millet, at times even acquiring power and profits from the Ottoman state. Succinctly, the Ottoman world was one in which they were increasingly integrated. Mesrob Krikorian has observed that no other dhimmi community "had such a large and permanent co-operation with the Ottoman government in the public affairs of Eastern Anatolia and Syria as the Armenian millet."22 While this relationship rapidly deteriorated in the last decades of the nine teenth century, reaching its tragic nadir in the genocide of the twenti eth century, Armenians were nonetheless crucial to the functioning of Ottoman society for much of the preceding centuries. Indeed, even as late as the 1870s, when Saprichian first published his narrative, many Ottoman Muslims still considered Armenians the millet i-sadika: "the loyal community," in contradistinction to the "instinctively hostile" and increasingly nationalist Greek and Slav millets.23 And while as Suny notes, the conception of an "ever-faithful" Armenian commu nity can only be understood as "a cultural construction of the domi nant nationality," its positive valuation was nonetheless based on a real commitment among many Armenians to the Ottoman system. Even if they would have rejected the idea of their own status as favorable, during the nineteenth century most Ottoman Armenians continued to "hope for the best within the Ottoman legal structure."24 Though indi vidual strategies and experiences undoubtedly varied tremendously, we can still discern the general patterns of this integration.