She left Gallaecia for Gaul as a child to avoid being denounced as a Christian and received the baptismal name Columba, meaning "dove" in French.

[1] According to Catholic historian Florence Capes, Columba's history "is somewhat legendary" [2] writer Fernando Lanzi called it "hardly historical".

[1][3] According to hagiographer Omer Englebert, she left Spain for France because she had been told it was where "a more beautiful religion flourished" and because she "had an insurmountable horror of idols".

[1] Aurelian, the Roman emperor (270–275), passed through Sens and put all the Christians there to death, but as Englebert reported, "Alone, Columba found favour in his eyes, such was the nobility and the beauty of her features revealing her high origin".

[1] Her body was left on the ground after she was killed, but a man named Aubertus, who had prayed to her for the restoration of his sight, took care of her burial.

[7] Poska speculated that a Visigothic church dedicated to Columba in Bande (near the Portuguese border) could have indicated the spread of her devotion before the Muslims invaded Spain.

[3][9] Writer Virginia Cox, who compared this poem with another poem and a prose piece Marinella wrote about Francis of Assisi,[3] stated that Marinella's appeal to Columba's story was not devotional; rather, it was "in its intrinsic narrative interest and in the allegorical potential suggested by the heroine's name, 'Dove,' which recalls the traditional imagery of the Holy Spirit and makes her story not simply one of a single, heroic maiden but one of the triumph of Christianity as a whole".