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It is important to note at this point that slavery in Aztec society was a practice clearly distinct from our western conceptions. An Aztec slave, or tlacotli, although clearly at the bottom of the social scale, possessed some personal rights. Slaves could marry freely, to another slave or a free person, and their children were born free. Although unpaid for their work, slaves were fed, clothed and housed as any citizen, living, according to some accounts, ‘almost free’ on their masters’ estates.¹⁴

Slavery could be a punishment, but many were ‘voluntary slaves’, lazy, tired, poor or in debt, who sold themselves for a fixed sum, which they had the right to spend before undertaking their servitude. A family, or group of families, might even sell a member into slavery and take turns at sharing the burden for a number of years. Slavery was not perpetual — emperors frequently performed mass manumissions at times of celebration, and masters often freed their slaves in their wills.

A slave who was to be sold also had a brief chance to escape. If he fled the market successfully, only the slave’s master and his sons having a right to stop him, then he would be set free if he could reach the tlatoani’s palace. Only an idle and delinquent slave could be sold, and not until he or she had been declared delinquent and traded three times did a slave become eligible to be sold as a human sacrifice. Slaves were very much a part of Aztec society, with both rights and responsibilities, though they were exempt from the military and labour services, which would have entitled them to the privileges of citizens.¹⁵ The sacrificial death of slaves was not the detached slaughter of strangers but the killing of familiar members of the community.

(Source.)