Within the household's inner service (enderun), he held the positions of letter-carrier (telhisci, or assistant to the grand vizier)[12][10] to Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, and of silahdar (armourer).

According to another contemporary report by Giovanni Benaglia, secretary of the Austrian ambassador in Istanbul, he divorced his "beloved Köprülü princess" after their engagement and after they had many children, and gave her to a French renegade, one of his favorites.

An account by a contemporary who visited his household, Claudio Angelo di Martelli, reports of three sons who survived his death: Yusuf, Mehmed, and the youngest Ali.

Later accounts by Giovanni Morosini di Alvise, Venetian bailo of Istanbul from 1675 to 1680, speak of a man "born in an obscure place of Asia, in Trebisonda, to castigate the nations," and describe him as "wholly venal, cruel and unfair."

As the Franco-allied wars ended, a preferential treatment of the Dutch became useless, and, as a result, Mustafa's relationship with Colyer grew troubled.

Within ten years, he was acting as deputy for his brother-in-law, the grand vizier Köprülüzade Fazıl Ahmed Pasha when absent from the Sultan's court.

[11] He served as a commander of ground troops in a war against Poland, negotiating a settlement with John Sobieski in 1676 that added the province of Podolia to the empire.

He suffered death by strangulation with a silk cord, which was the method of capital punishment inflicted on high-ranking persons in the Ottoman Empire.

Whereas historians describe him either as a capable tactician or reckless commander, Kemal Atatürk held a sympathetic view of the man.

It is said that, while attending a lecture at an Ankara institution in 1933, at which a professor spoke disparagingly of Kara Mustafa Pasha, Atatürk spoke up in favour of Kara Mustafa, arguing that marching an army of 173,000 men from Constantinople to Vienna, the "heart of Europe", was a colossal undertaking for any commander, and that the only other person who came close to such a feat was Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent himself.