> I'm not sure I could have navigated it at all wearing armor
That’s another myth. Wearing a reasonable form of plate mail is sort of heavy, but doesn’t really restrict your movement as much as people seem to think.
That’s another myth. Wearing a reasonable form of plate mail is sort of heavy, but doesn’t really restrict your movement as much as people seem to think.
Now, the difference is that I'm probably bigger than your average footman or knight who might have been trying to go up those stairs. But they definitely wouldn't be passing anyone on the stairs, and they definitely would have had trouble hacking on someone who was above them on the staircase.
The one key fact that puts the idea to rest is all the staircases I've seen that spiral clockwise in one part of the building, and counter-clockwise in the other. Everything else being equal, both sets of stairs could be used to go either up or down, and you could choose which set to use. At Köln Cathedral, they tell you which ones are for up and which ones are for down, but if you're an invading attacker, you don't pay attention to the rules of the house you're invading.
Probably there was. It might have also had nothing to do with making it easier to defend the staircase during combat. Maybe they just found that carry stuff up if the stairs go clockwise is easier. Maybe counterclockwise works better for those climbing down. But in most places you don’t really have enough space for two staircases so you just chose which (up/down) is more important to you
Smart! One staircase to defend from attackers coming up from the ground and another to defend from attackers coming from the roof.
I imagine 5-10cm is enough, at least to the point you can wrangle yourself up the stairs, but you wouldn’t be fighting there in the first place with that amount of space.