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, and brother of Boris de Rachewiltz. The de Rachewiltz family was of noble roots. His grand-grand grandmother or perhaps grand-grandmother was a Tatar from Kazan in central Russia who claimed lineage from the Golden Horde. In 1947, he read Michael Prawdin's 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 Khitan scholar Yelü Chucai. He married Ines Adelaide Brasch in 1956; they had 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 Sapienza University of Rome three times (1996, 1999, 2001). In 2004, he published his translation of the Secret History with Brill Publishers; 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.

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.