The city of Nikopolis was founded on the ruins of Emmaus in early 3rd century CE. Soon after it was refounded to become a "city" (πόλις), which quickly became famous, and was given the qualification of 'Nicopolis'. Eusebius writes ""Emmaus, whence was Cleopas who is mentioned by the Evangelist Luke. Today it is Nicopolis, a famous city of Palestine."" In 222 CE, a basilica was erected there, which was rebuilt first by the Byzantines and later modified by the Crusaders. During the Byzantine period Emmaus-Nicopolis became a large city and a bishopric. A substantial church complex was erected on the spot where tradition maintained the apparition of the risen Christ had occurred, a site which then became a place of pilgrimage, and whose ruins are still extant. At the time of the Muslim conquest of Palestine, the main encampment of the Arab army was established in Emmaus, when a plague ("ța'ūn") struck, carrying off many of Companions of the Prophet. This first encounter of the Arab armies with the chronic plagues of Syria was later referred to as the 'plague of 'Amawās', a and the event marked the decline of Emmaus Nicopolis. A well on the site still bears an inscription reading "the well of the plague" ("bi'r aț-ța'ūn"). During the Crusader period, the Christian presence resumed at Emmaus, and the Byzantine church was restored. However, the memory of the apparition of the risen Jesus at Emmaus also started to be celebrated in three other places in the Holy Land: Motza (c. west of Jerusalem), Qubeibe (c. northwest of Jerusalem) Abu Ghosh (c. west of Jerusalem). The Arab village of Amwas was identified once again as the biblical Emmaus and the Roman-Byzantine Nicopolis by scholars in the 19th century, including Edward Robinson(1838–1852),  M.-V. Guérin (1868), Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau (1874), and J.-B. Guillemot (1880–1887). Significantly, a local mystic named Saint Mariam of Jesus Crucified, a nun of the Carmelite monastery of Bethlehem, had a revelation while in ecstatic prayer in 1878 in which Jesus appeared to indicate Amwas was the Gospel Emmaus. ""She came to the top of a knoll where, amid grass and thorns, there were some freestones leveled.