 At a later point the imperial family would then have passed the manuscript on to Echternach.A highly plausible suggestion however has been made by , namely that the front cover was commissioned really for Echternach (to Archbishop Egbert, while meeting him at Christmas 988 in Cologne) by Empress Theophanu (and Otto III) out of religious gratitude for her recovering of the illness that struck her at the end of the summer of 988 at Lake Constance; her adoration for Saint Willibrord, as shown by former gifts to Echternach, in that case was an additional motive in the perspective of the 250th anniversary of his death (November 7, 739 AD).It is thought that this is the manuscript shown to Henry III, Holy Roman Emperor when he visited Echternach with his mother Gisela of Swabia (d. 1043), which so impressed him that he commissioned similar works from the abbey, notably the Golden Gospels of Henry III, which he presented in 1046 to Speyer Cathedral, the burial-place of his dynasty.