Romanus Pontifex, issued by Nicholas V on 8 January 1455, is the longest and the most consequential of the three bulls. It rehearses the Portuguese voyages of the previous decades at length, praises Prince Henry by name, confirms the faculties granted in Dum Diversas, and then adds the clause that made it a charter rather than a licence: the lands and seas already acquired and those still to be acquired from Cape Bojador southward as far as the Indies are granted to the Portuguese crown, to it alone, forever.
Two things follow from that word alone. The first is a monopoly. No other Christian prince was to trade, fish or sail in the region without Portuguese leave, on pain of excommunication, which turned a papal grant into an instrument of commercial exclusion enforceable in every Christian court. The second is a rule of title. If a pope could grant lands not yet seen to a king who had not yet reached them, the people already living there held nothing a Christian sovereign was bound to respect.
The bull also confirms in plain terms the reduction of the inhabitants to perpetual slavery, and it was read out in Lisbon Cathedral in Portuguese so that its terms were public. Frances Gardiner Davenport printed the Latin text with a facing English translation in 1917, which is why the wording is quoted so consistently in the modern argument about it.