Tricorii
The Tricorii were a Gallic tribe living in the Drac valley, in the Dauphiné Prealps, during the Iron Age and the Roman period. They are attested in ancient sources primarily in connection with Hannibal's crossing of the Alps in 218 BC, and later with the Helvetii migration into Gaul in 58 BC during the Gallic Wars. The Tricorii did not form a civitas under the Roman Empire and appear to have been either subdued by Rome at an earlier date or assimilated into a neighbouring people after the Roman conquest.
Name
They are mentioned as Trikórioi by Strabo, Trigorios by Livy, Tríkourous by Appian, and as Tricorios by Ammianus Marcellinus.The Gaulish ethnonym Tricorii means 'three armies', or 'three troops'. It derives from the Gaulish stem tri- attached to corios, after a Gallic custom of including numbers in tribal names.
Some scholars have also compared the ethnonym Tricorii with the Breton toponym pagus Tricurīnus and the 7th-century Brittonic toponym Tricurius.
They must be distinguished from the Tricores, who lived further south near Massalia.
Geography
Their territory was located in the valley of the Drac river, along the Montgenèvre route, on the south-western fringe of the Alpine massif. They were situated south of the Allobroges and Ucennii, east of the Segovellauni, west of the Brigianii and Caturiges, and north of the Avantici. According to Guy Barruol, the Tricorii were not part of any confederation or clients of a larger tribe before the Roman conquest.The exact boundaries of their territory depends on interpretations of Livy's itinerary, particularly the phrase per extremam oram Vocontiorum agri, which has been translated either as skirting the Vocontii frontier or crossing their territory, leading to varying reconstructions that place the Tricorii in an area restricted to the Trièves region, or extending into the Buëch or the Durance valley. The association with the name Trièves based on homophony is debated, since it is attested as Tarao in the 7th century AD.
During the Roman period, none of their settlements was elevated to the status of a civitas. Their absence from the Tropaeum Alpium indicates that they were not among the Alpine peoples conquered by Augustus in 16–7 BC, that they were either subdued earlier or already assimilated into a larger group at that time, which may explain why they did not form a civitas under the Roman Empire. Some scholars have proposed that the Tricorii were integrated into the Vocontii in the 1st century BC, a view supported by the later inclusion of Trièves in the medieval diocese of Die.
In Late Antiquity, the region was dismantled and redistributed among neighbouring administrative districts: the upper Drac valley was attached to the diocese of Gap in Narbonensis Secunda; the Ebron valley to the bishopric of Die in Viennensis; and the right bank of the middle Drac valley together with the lower valley to the diocese of Grenoble, also in Viennensis.