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About Igor de Rachewiltz
- Igor de Rachewiltz (April 11, 1929 – July 30, 2016) was an Italian historian and philologist specializing in Mongol studies. Igor de Rachewiltz was born in Rome, the son of Bruno Guido and Antonina Perosio.
- The de Rachewiltz family was of noble roots.
- His grandmother was a Tatar from Kazan in central Russia who claimed lineage from the Golden Horde.
- In 1947, he read Michael Prawdin's book Tschingis-Chan und seine Erben (Genghis Khan and his Heritage) and became interested in learning the Mongolian language.
- He graduated with a law degree from a university in Rome and pursued Oriental studies in Naples.
- In the early 1950s, de Rachewiltz went to Australia on scholarship.
- He earned his PhD in Chinese history from Australian National University, Canberra in 1961.
- His dissertation was on Genghis Khan's secretary, 13th-century Chinese scholar Yelü Chucai.
- He married Ines Adelaide Brasch in 1956; they have one daughter.Starting in 1965 he became a fellow at the Department of Far Eastern History, Australian National University (1965–67).
- He made a research trip to Europe (1966–67).
- He published a translation of The Secret History of the Mongols in eleven volumes of Papers on Far Eastern History (1971–1985).
- He became a senior Fellow of the Division of Pacific and Asian History at the Australian National University (1967–94), a research-only fellowship.
- He completed projects by prominent Mongolists Antoine Mostaert and Henri Serruys after their deaths.
- He was a visiting professor at the University of Rome three times (1996, 1999, 2001).
- In 2004 he published his translation of the Secret History with Brill; it was selected by Choice as Outstanding Academic Title (2005) and is now in its second edition.
- In 2007 he donated his personal library of around 6000 volumes to the Scheut Memorial Library at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
- Late in his life de Rachewiltz was an emeritus Fellow in the Pacific and Asian History Division of the Australian National University.
- His research interests included the political and cultural history of China and Mongolia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, East-West political and cultural contacts, and Sino-Mongolian philology generally.
- In 2015, de Rachewiltz published an open access version of his previous translation, The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century, that is a full translation but omits the extensive footnotes of his previous translations.Igor de Rachewiltz died on July 30, 2016.
- He was 87.
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