Peter was a rough, stern man, and he determined to punish the abettors of this rebellion with severity, which should appall all the discontented.  General Gordon, in the battle, had slain three thousand of the insurgents and had taken five thousand captive.  These prisoners he had punished, decimating them by lot and hanging every tenth man.  Peter rewarded magnificently the royal guard, and then commenced the terrible chastisement of all who were judged guilty of sympathizing in the conspiracy.  Some were broken on the wheel and then beheaded.  Others were hung in chains, on gibbets near the gates of the city, and left, frozen as solid as marble, to swing in the wind through the long months of winter.  Stone monuments were erected, on which were engraved the names, the crimes and the punishment of the rebels.  A large number were banished to Siberia, to Astrachan, and to the shores of the Sea of Azof.  The entire corps of the strelitzes was abolished, and their place supplied by the new guard, marshaled and disciplined on the model of the German troops.  The long and cumbersome robes which had been in fashion were exchanged for a uniform better adapted for rapid motion.  The sons of the nobles were compelled to serve in the ranks as common soldiers before they could be promoted to be officers.  Many of the young nobles were sent to the tzar’s fleet in the Sea of Azof to serve their apprenticeship for the navy.  The revenue of the empire had thus far been raised by the payment of a stipulated sum from each noble according to his amount of land.  The noble collected this sum from his vassals or bondmen; but they often failed of paying in the amount demanded.  Peter took now the collection of the revenue into his own hands, appointing officers for that purpose.

Reforms in the church he also undertook.  The patriarch, Adrian, who was the pope of the Greek church, dying about this time, Peter declared that he should have no successor.  Virtually assuming the authority of the head of the church, he gathered the immense revenues of the patriarchal see into the royal treasury.  Though professedly intrusting the government of the church to the bishops, he controlled them with despotism which could brook no opposition.  Anxious to promote the population of his vast empire, so sparsely inhabited, he caused a decree to be issued, that all the clergy, of every, grade, should be married; and that whenever one of the clergy lost a wife his clerical functions should cease until he obtained another.  Regarding the monastic vow, which consigned young men and young women to a life of indolence in the cloister, as alike injurious to morality and to the interests of the State, he forbade any one from taking that vow until after the age of fifty had been passed.  This salutary regulation has since his time been repealed.