His two years of foreign travel enabled him to see with his own eyes the advantages of European civilisation and government, and to learn how to make with his own hands the ships which were to spread the greatness of the Russian name round the shores of the Black Sea. Neither lesson was thrown away. Directly he got back to Russia he began to foster everything western at the expense of everything national. He introduced western dress, western habits, western dancing, and even western shaving. He encouraged the settlement of foreigners, and spent a good deal of his time in the German suburb of Moscow with his foreign friends. Directly he obtained possession of the mouth of the Neva, he built his new capital S. Petersburg, to take the place of conservative and traditional Moscow, as the centre of his new polity. At the same time he took good care to make the foundations of his government secure. The revolt of the Streltsi in 1698 gave him the opportunity of abolishing a force, which was too much mixed up with the old aristocracy of Russia ever to be really loyal to the new regime, and to replace them by a professional army trained on the European model under foreign officers. He tried as much as possible to depress the power of the boyárs, surrounding himself with friends and ministers like Menschikoff, who were drawn from a lower class of society. So successful was this policy that in 1711 he felt himself able to bring the political power of the boyárs to an end by forbidding their council to meet any longer. With a similar object he refused to nominate a successor to the patriarch Adrian on his death in 1700, but placed the powers of the patriarchate in the hands of a commission, afterwards called the Holy Governing Synod, which brought the affairs of the Church more definitely under his own control. [Sidenote: =His foreign policy.=]