demographic and economic degradation and the expansion of nomadic tribes. Whereas the Russian monk Zosimus estimated in 1420 the number of inhabitants at 30, the German traveler Felix Fabri recorded in the early 1480s, only six who were living together with a group of nomadic Arabs. Thereafter, the monastery was abandoned, and the remaining monks seem to have moved to Saint Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai.

In 1504, the Serbian monastic community