Miguel de Arruda

[1] In 1533 John III appointed him mestre de obras at Batalha Monastery,[2] where Castilho had been working on repairs to the royal pantheon since 1528.

[2] Between 1541 and 1542 Arruda was one of the architects, together with the Spanish-Portuguese master builder and architect João de Castilho and Diogo de Torralva, who were later joined by the Italian engineer Benedetto da Ravenna, and who worked on the Portuguese fortress at Mazagan, the present-day Moroccan port-city of El Jadida, and which was the first Portuguese fortified site with angular bastions.

[4] Indeed, Arruda has been considered as representing the "transition from the earlier design mindset of Benedetto da Ravenna's generation to that of the later sixteenth century",[5] and in the case of the Royal Walls at Ceuta, Arruda made key alterations to Da Ravenna's initial 1541 design, especially to the bastions on the western front.

[6] In August 1545 Castro wrote to the King from the Island of Mozambique advocating the construction of a new fortress there, capable of withstanding the threat of Turkish artillery.

[7][8] In 1548/49, the King appointed Arruda to the newly created post of "Master of the Works on the Walls and Fortifications of the Kingdom, Places in Além (Africa) and India"[2] and, that same year, together with Diogo Telles, Arruda was inspecting Tangier's defences, and ensuring that the mestre there, André Rodrigues, implemented some of the alterations made earlier at Ceuta.