Momentum goes all the way back to the 16th century. Three people had major affects on how momentum is understood today. They are Rene Descartes, Christiaan Huygens, and Sir Isaac Newton.
Rene Descartes was a French scientist, mathematician, and philosopher who wrote a definition for momentum in 1644. He stated the it was the product of mass of the body and it's velocity or speed.
Christiaan Huygens was a Dutch mathematician, astronomer, physicist, and horologist. He accepted Descartes' definition but generalized it to all collisions between bodies of equal mass.
Lastly, we have Sir Isaac Newton. Newton was influenced by both Descartes and Huygens but stated the law of conservation of momentum in more general terms. In 1687, He states in the third law of motion that the forces of action and reaction between two bodies are equal, opposite, and collinear.
So in the short time span of 1644 to 1687, momentum had been changed to what we today know it as: The quantity of motion of a moving body, measured as a product of its mass and velocity.