On October 13, Peter arrived at Torgau, the castle of the Queen of Poland, where his son was to be married. This site, rather than Dresden, had been chosen so that the ceremony could be private, without the necessity of inviting the King of Prussia, the Elector of Hanover and other German princes, thus avoiding problems of protocol and saving time for the Tsar and money for the bride's father, the Duke of Wolfenbuttel. The wedding took place on Sunday, October 14, 1711, in the great hall of the palace. In order to increase the illuminated brilliance of the occasion, the windows were covered and the walls hung with mirrors to reflect the light of thousands of candles. The Orthodox service was performed in Russian, except that the bride, who had been converted from Lutheranism to become the consort of a future tsar, was ritually questioned in Latin. A marriage supper in the Queen's apartments was followed by a ball, after which, reported a contemporary chronicler, "His Great Tsarish Majesty gave his fatherly blessing in a most touching manner to the newly married pair and himself conducted them to their bedchamber." That same night, before retiring, Peter managed to write to Menshikov:
I will answer your letter later. I have no time now because of the marriage of my son, which was celebrated today, thank God, in a good way, with many notable people present. The marriage took place in the house of the Queen of Poland and the watermelon sent by you was put upon the table, which vegetable is a mighty wonder here.
In Torgau, Peter finally met Gottfried von Leibniz. Ever since Peter's first visit to Germany at the time of the Great Embassy, the famous philosopher and mathematician had waited for a chance to get the Tsar's ear and to urge on him new institutions for learning and research. When he finally met Peter, Leibniz achieved at least a partial success. The Tsar did not turn over to him the future of Russian culture and education, but the following year he did appoint Leibniz a Councilor of Justice, assign him a salary (never paid) and ask him to draw up a list of proposed educational, legal and administrative reforms. As Leibniz described their next meeting, at Carlsbad in 1712, to the Electress Sophia:
I found His Majesty on the point of finishing his cure. He nevertheless desired to wait some days before leaving here, because last year he found himself unwell from having begun to travel immediately after his cure. . . . Your Electoral Highness will find it extraordinary that I am to be in a sense the Solon of Russia, although at a distance. That is to say that the Tsar has told me through Golovkin, his Grand Chancellor, that I am to reform the laws and draw up some regulations for the administration of justice. As I hold that the best laws are shortest, like the Ten Commandments or the Twelve Tables of Ancient Rome, and as this subject is one of my earliest studies, this will scarcely keep me long.
The Duke of Wolfenbuttel, a regular correspondent of Leibniz', jokingly warned the "new Solon" that he might receive little for his efforts other than the Cross of St. Andrew. Leibniz replied, disparaging his new assignment:
I am very glad to have made Your Highness laugh a little at my Russian Solon. But a Russian Solon does not need the wisdom of the Greeks and can get along with less. The Cross of St. Andrew I should like very well if it were set in diamonds, but these are not given in Hanover, but only by the Tsar. Still my promised five hundred ducats were very acceptable.
At the end of December 1711, Peter returned to St. Petersburg after an absence of almost a year. Once there, he threw himself into the administration of domestic affairs which had languished while he was on the Pruth and in Germany. He gave instructions for the expansion of trade with Persia, formed a company of merchants to trade with China and, in April 1712, commanded his newly established Russian Senate to move from Moscow to St. Petersburg. His presence spurred much new construction along the Neva, and, in May, Peter laid the cornerstone for the new Cathedral of Peter and Paul which Trezzini was to erect within the fortress.
That spring was a worrisome time for Peter—he still had not evacuated his garrisons in Azov and Tagonrog and the Turks had declared war a second time—but he was reassured by an unusual vision which he described to Whitworth and which the ambassador faithfully reported to London:
Some nights ago the Tsar dreamed: he saw all sorts of wild beasts fighting together, from among which a fierce tiger made at him with open jaws and put him into such confusion that he could neither defend himself nor retreat. But a voice, he could not tell from whence it came, called out to him several times that he should not fear, and the tiger stopped short of a sudden without any further attempt [to harm him]. Then four people appeared in white and, advancing into the middle of the wild beasts, their rage immediately ceased and all separated in peace. The dream has made such an impression on his [the Tsar's] fancy that he noted it down in his table book with the day of the month. I find it has really increased his confidence.
On February 19, 1712, Peter formalized and publicly proclaimed his marriage to Catherine. The ceremony, which took place at seven a.m. in Prince Menshikov's private chapel, was intended to clarify her position as his wife and official consort to those who said that their private marriage in November 1707 was insufficient for a tsar and tsaritsa. It also was a mark of Peter's gratitude to this calm, devoted woman whose sturdy courage during the Pruth campaign had helped carry him through that disastrous episode. Peter was married in the uniform of a rear admiral, with Vice Admiral Cruys acting as his sponsor, and other naval officers acting as witnesses. Returning to his own palace in sledges between lines of trumpeters and drummers, Peter halted his sledge before he reached his front door so that he could go inside and hang over the dinner table his wedding gift to Catherine. It was a six-branched candelabrum of ivory and ebony which he himself had made in two weeks of work. That evening, wrote Whitworth, "the company was very splendid, the dinner magnificent, the wine good, from Hungary, and what was the greatest pleasure, not forced on the guests in too large quantities. The evening was concluded with a ball and fireworks." Peter was in a jolly mood; at one point in the festivity, he confided to Whitworth and the Danish ambassador that it was "a fruitful wedding, for they already had had five children."
Two years later, Peter further honored Catherine by creating a new decoration, the Order of St. Catherine, her patron saint, which consisted of a cross hanging on a white ribbon inscribed with the motto, "Out of Love and Fidelity to My Country." The new order, Peter declared, commemorated his wife's role in the Pruth campaign, where she had behaved "not as a woman, but as a man."
At the beginning of 1711, even before the ill-fated campaign on the Pruth, Peter's interest was to make peace with Sweden. He had richly achieved his war aims. St. Petersburg had been given its "cushion" to the north by the capture of Vyborg and the province of Karelia. It was secured from the south by the occupation of Ingria and Livonia. Two additional seaports, Riga and Reval, along with St. Petersburg, had opened Russia's Baltic "Window on the West" as wide as could conceivably be needed. There was nothing more that Peter wanted, and he sincerely desired peace.
The governing Council and the people of Sweden also wanted peace. Sweden was defeated, the war was ruinous and the only realistic prospect was that if it continued, it would get worse. In the summer of Poltava, 1709, the harvest in Sweden failed. That autumn, emboldened by the Russian victory, Denmark reentered the war. In 1710 and 1711, the plague swept across Sweden; Stockholm lost one third of its population. Now, at the end of 1711, as the Tsar roamed freely through Germany meeting kings and princes and taking the waters, Sweden was exhausted. It had no allies, while ranged against it was the formidable coalition of Russia, Denmark, Saxony and Poland. Before long, Hanover and Prussia would also enter the anti-Swedish alliance.