The bridge was the first major work designed by the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan, and was part of a vakıf complex that also included a caravanserai, mosque, bazaar and hamam.

[2][5] The Ottoman army unsuccessfully attempted to destroy the bridge as it retreated from a Bulgarian advance after the Battle of Lule Burgas during the First Balkan War in November 1912.

At Mustapha Pasha, twenty miles in front of Adrianople, was a solid old stone bridge over the Maritza whose floods in the winter rains would be a nightmare to engineers who had to maintain a crossing with pontoons.

They found that a small and badly placed charge of dynamite had merely knocked out a few stones between two of the buttresses, leaving the bridge intact enough for all the armies of Europe to pass over it; and the Turks did not even put a mitrailleuse behind sandbags in the streets or use field guns from the adjacent hills to delay the Bulgars in their crossing.

The English text reads: This bridge was built during Sultan Suleiman Han's time by his vezir Mustapha Pacha en 1529.