Igor de Rachewiltz

Who is Igor de Rachewiltz?

Igor de Rachewiltz is 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 Polish noble roots. His grandmother was a Tatar from Kazan in eastern Russia who claimed lineage from the Golden Horde. In 1947, he read Michael Prawdin's book Tschingis-Chan und seine Erben 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 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. He made a research trip to Europe. He published a translation of The Secret History of the Mongols in eleven volumes of Papers on Far Eastern History. He became a senior Fellow of the Division of Pacific and Asian History at the Australian National University, 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. In 2004 he published his translation of the Secret History with Brill; it was selected by Choice as Outstanding Academic Title 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. Currently de Rachewiltz is an emeritus Fellow in the Pacific and Asian History Division of the Australian National University. His research interests include 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.